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Main Authors: Bona, Marcella, Heatley, Nathan, Hua, Jia-Chen, Lara, Adriana, Legaria-Santiago, Valeria, Juarez, Alberto Luviano, Moreno-Gomez, Fernando, Richardson, Jocelyn, Vilchis, Natan, Zheng, Xiwen Shirley
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.23215
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author Bona, Marcella
Heatley, Nathan
Hua, Jia-Chen
Lara, Adriana
Legaria-Santiago, Valeria
Juarez, Alberto Luviano
Moreno-Gomez, Fernando
Richardson, Jocelyn
Vilchis, Natan
Zheng, Xiwen Shirley
author_facet Bona, Marcella
Heatley, Nathan
Hua, Jia-Chen
Lara, Adriana
Legaria-Santiago, Valeria
Juarez, Alberto Luviano
Moreno-Gomez, Fernando
Richardson, Jocelyn
Vilchis, Natan
Zheng, Xiwen Shirley
contents Air pollution is a chronic problem in large cities worldwide and awareness is rising as the long-term health implications become clearer. Vehicular traffic has been identified as a major contributor to poor air quality. In a lot of cities the publicly available air quality measurements and forecasts are coarse-grained both in space and time. However, in general, real-time traffic intensity data is openly available in various forms and is fine-grained. In this paper, we present an in-depth study of pollution sensor measurements combined with traffic data from Mexico City. We analyse and model the relationship between traffic intensity and air quality with the aim to provide hyper-local, dynamic air quality forecasts. We developed an innovative method to represent traffic intensities by transforming simple colour-coded traffic maps into concentric ring-based descriptions, enabling improved characterisation of traffic conditions. Using Partial Least Squares Regression, we predict pollution levels based on these newly defined traffic intensities. The model was optimised with various training samples to achieve the best predictive performance and gain insights into the relationship between pollutants and traffic. The workflow we have designed is straightforward and adaptable to other contexts, like other cities beyond the specifics of our dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_23215
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tackling air quality with SAPIENS
Bona, Marcella
Heatley, Nathan
Hua, Jia-Chen
Lara, Adriana
Legaria-Santiago, Valeria
Juarez, Alberto Luviano
Moreno-Gomez, Fernando
Richardson, Jocelyn
Vilchis, Natan
Zheng, Xiwen Shirley
Machine Learning
Air pollution is a chronic problem in large cities worldwide and awareness is rising as the long-term health implications become clearer. Vehicular traffic has been identified as a major contributor to poor air quality. In a lot of cities the publicly available air quality measurements and forecasts are coarse-grained both in space and time. However, in general, real-time traffic intensity data is openly available in various forms and is fine-grained. In this paper, we present an in-depth study of pollution sensor measurements combined with traffic data from Mexico City. We analyse and model the relationship between traffic intensity and air quality with the aim to provide hyper-local, dynamic air quality forecasts. We developed an innovative method to represent traffic intensities by transforming simple colour-coded traffic maps into concentric ring-based descriptions, enabling improved characterisation of traffic conditions. Using Partial Least Squares Regression, we predict pollution levels based on these newly defined traffic intensities. The model was optimised with various training samples to achieve the best predictive performance and gain insights into the relationship between pollutants and traffic. The workflow we have designed is straightforward and adaptable to other contexts, like other cities beyond the specifics of our dataset.
title Tackling air quality with SAPIENS
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.23215