Prediction and cause investigation of ozone based on a double-stage attention mechanism recurrent neural network

● Used a double-stage attention mechanism model to predict ozone. ● The model can autonomously select the appropriate time series for forecasting. ● The model outperforms other machine learning models and WRF-CMAQ. ● We used the model to analyze the driving factors of VOCs that cause ozone pollution. Ozone is becoming a significant air pollutant in some regions, and VOCs are essential for ozone prediction as necessary ozone precursors. In this study, we proposed a recurrent neural network based on a double-stage attention mechanism model to predict ozone, selected an appropriate time series for prediction through the input attention and temporal attention mechanisms, and analyzed the cause of ozone generation according to the contribution of feature parameters. The experimental data show that our model had an RMSE of 7.71 μg/m³ and a mean absolute error of 5.97 μg/m³ for 1-h predictions. The DA-RNN model predicted ozone closer to observations than the other models. Based on the importance of the characteristics, we found that the ozone pollution in the Jinshan Industrial Zone mainly comes from the emissions of petrochemical enterprises, and the good generalization performance of the model is proved through testing multiple stations. Our experimental results demonstrate the validity and promising application of the DA-RNN model in predicting atmospheric pollutants and investigating their causes.