NeuroDDAF: Neural Dynamic Diffusion-Advection Fields with Evidential Fusion for Air Quality Forecasting

arXiv cs.LG / 4/2/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces NeuroDDAF, a physics-informed air quality forecasting framework designed to handle nonlinear spatiotemporal dynamics, wind-driven transport, and cross-region distribution shifts.
  • NeuroDDAF combines a GRU-Graph Attention encoder for temporal and wind-aware spatial interactions with a Fourier-domain diffusion-advection module and a wind-modulated latent Neural ODE for continuous-time evolution.
  • It uses an evidential fusion mechanism to adaptively blend physics-guided and neural predictions while producing calibrated uncertainty estimates.
  • Experiments on four urban datasets (Beijing, Shenzhen, Tianjin, Ancona) across 1–3 day horizons show consistent gains over strong baselines, including AirPhyNet, with up to 9.7% RMSE and 9.4% MAE reductions on long-term forecasts.
  • NeuroDDAF also demonstrates improved cross-city generalization and better-calibrated uncertainty under varying wind conditions.

Abstract

Accurate air quality forecasting is crucial for protecting public health and guiding environmental policy, yet it remains challenging due to nonlinear spatiotemporal dynamics, wind-driven transport, and distribution shifts across regions. Physics-based models are interpretable but computationally expensive and often rely on restrictive assumptions, whereas purely data-driven models can be accurate but may lack robustness and calibrated uncertainty. To address these limitations, we propose Neural Dynamic Diffusion-Advection Fields (NeuroDDAF), a physics-informed forecasting framework that unifies neural representation learning with open-system transport modeling. NeuroDDAF integrates (i) a GRU-Graph Attention encoder to capture temporal dynamics and wind-aware spatial interactions, (ii) a Fourier-domain diffusion-advection module with learnable residuals, (iii) a wind-modulated latent Neural ODE to model continuous-time evolution under time-varying connectivity, and (iv) an evidential fusion mechanism that adaptively combines physics-guided and neural forecasts while quantifying uncertainty. Experiments on four urban datasets (Beijing, Shenzhen, Tianjin, and Ancona) across 1-3 day horizons show that NeuroDDAF consistently outperforms strong baselines, including AirPhyNet, achieving up to 9.7% reduction in RMSE and 9.4% reduction in MAE on long-term forecasts. On the Beijing dataset, NeuroDDAF attains an RMSE of 41.63 \mug/m^3 for 1-day prediction and 48.88 \mug/m^3 for 3-day prediction, representing the best performance among all compared methods. In addition, NeuroDDAF improves cross-city generalization and yields well-calibrated uncertainty estimates, as confirmed by ensemble variance analysis and case studies under varying wind conditions.