Learning machines: Rationale and application in ground-level ozone prediction

Address the potential of learning machine to forecast ground-level ozone in urban area.Summarize the existing learning machines used to predict ground-level ozone.Compare the performance of commented models via practical case in Hong Kong.Address the underlying philosophy of using learning machine in ozone related prediction. Multilayer perceptron (MLP) and support vector machine (SVM), two popular learning machines, are increasingly being used as alternatives to classical statistical models for ground-level ozone prediction. However, employing learning machines without sufficient awareness about their limitations can lead to unsatisfactory results in modeling the ozone evolving mechanism, especially during ozone formation episodes. With the spirit of literature review and justification, this paper discusses, with respect to the concerning of ozone prediction, the recently developed algorithms/technologies for treating the most prominent model-performance-degradation limitations. MLP has the "black-box" property, i.e., it hardly provides physical explanation for the trained model, overfitting and local minima problems, and SVM has parameters identification and class imbalance problems. This commentary article aims to stress that the underlying philosophy of using learning machines is by no means as trivial as simply fitting models to the data because it causes difficulties, controversies or unresolved problems. This article also aims to serve as a reference point for further technical readings for experts in relevant fields.