Using machine learning to estimate atmospheric pollen concentrations in Tulsa, OK

Abstract

This article describes an example of using machine learning to estimate the abundance of airborne Ambrosia pollen for Tulsa, OK. Twenty-seven years of historical pollen observations were used. These pollen observations were combined with machine learning and a very complete meteorological and land surface context of 85 variables to estimate the daily Ambrosia abundance. The machine learning algorithms employed were Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO), neural networks, and random forests. The best performance was obtained using random forests. The physical insights provided by the random forest are also discussed.