Abstract
We develop a portable and affordable solution for estimating personal
exposure to black carbon (BC) using low- cost sensors and machine
learning. Our approach uses other pollutants and environmental variables
as proxies for estimating the concentrations of BC and combines this
with machine learning based sensor calibration to improve the quality of
the inputs that are used as proxies in the modeling. We extensively
validate the feasibility of our approach and demonstrate its benefits
with benchmarks conducted on real world data from two different urban
locations with different population densities and characteristics. Our
results demonstrate that our approach can accurately estimate BC
(R2 higher than 0.9) without relying on a
dedicated sensor. The results also highlight how calibration is
essential for ensuring accurate modeling on low-cost sensor
measurements. Our results offer a novel affordable and portable solution
that can be used to estimate personal exposure to BC and, more
generally, demonstrate how low-cost sensors and proxy modeling can
increase the spatiotemporal scale at which information about BC level is
available.