Delhi Air Quality Forecasting and Pollution Risk Early Warning System

Project overview

This project builds an end-to-end data science pipeline to forecast next-day PM2.5 levels in Delhi using air-quality and meteorological data from 2025.

The project combines:

• air-quality data collection
• weather data collection
• data cleaning and merging
• next-day PM2.5 forecasting
• model comparison
• pollution risk categorisation
• research-oriented interpretation

Objective

The main objective is to predict next-day PM2.5 concentration and translate it into a practical pollution risk category.

Data sources

• Open-Meteo Air Quality API
• NASA POWER Daily API

Final dataset

The final modeling dataset contains:

• daily air-quality variables
• daily weather variables
• next-day PM2.5 target
• risk category labels

Models tested

• Baseline persistence model
• Linear Regression
• Random Forest

Main result

The baseline persistence model performed best, outperforming the tested machine learning models.

Outputs created

• processed modeling dataset
• model comparison table
• risk summary table
• PM2.5 time-series plot
• correlation matrix
• final metrics summary

Project status

Notebook pipeline completed successfully.

Methodology summary

1. Collected hourly air-quality data for Delhi from Open-Meteo Air Quality API for 2025.
2. Collected daily weather data for Delhi from NASA POWER for 2025.
3. Aggregated hourly air-quality data to daily averages.
4. Merged daily pollutant and meteorological datasets by date.
5. Created next-day PM2.5 as the prediction target.
6. Built baseline, Linear Regression, and Random Forest models.
7. Evaluated models using MAE, RMSE, and R2.
8. Created pollution-risk categories from next-day PM2.5.

Key results

• Final modeling dataset size: 364 rows and 12 columns
• Best model: Baseline persistence
• Baseline MAE: 15.52478250915751
• Baseline RMSE: 22.963507026633046
• Baseline R2: 0.6284562026479149
• Best non-baseline model: Linear Regression with lag features

Project files

• data/raw/delhi_air_quality_hourly_2025.csv
• data/raw/delhi_weather_daily_2025.csv
• data/processed/delhi_pm25_model_data_2025.csv
• data/processed/delhi_pm25_model_data_with_risk_2025.csv
• outputs/model_comparison_2025.csv
• outputs/risk_summary_2025.csv
• outputs/delhi_daily_pm25_2025.png
• outputs/correlation_matrix_2025.csv
• outputs/final_metrics_summary_2025.csv
• notebooks/delhi_air_quality_forecasting_2025.ipynb