Environmental pollution has mainly been attributed to urbanization and industrial developments across the globe. Air pollution has been marked as one of the major problems of metropolitan areas around the world, especially in Tehran, the capital of Iran, where its administrators and residents have long been struggling with air pollution damage such as the health issues of its citizens. As far as the study area of this research is concerned, a considerable proportion of Tehran air pollution is attributed to PM10 and PM2.5 pollutants. Therefore, the present study was conducted to determine the prediction models to determine air pollutions based on PM10 and PM2.5 pollution concentrations in Tehran. To predict the air-pollution, the data related to day of week, month of year, topography, meteorology, and pollutant rate of two nearest neighbors as the input parameters and machine learning methods were used. These methods include a regression support vector machine, geographically weighted regression, artificial neural network and auto-regressive nonlinear neural network with an external input as the machine learning method for the air pollution prediction. A prediction model was then proposed to improve the afore-mentioned methods, by which the error percentage has been reduced and improved by 57%, 47%, 47% and 94%, respectively. The most reliable algorithm for the prediction of air pollution was autoregressive nonlinear neural network with external input using the proposed prediction model, where its one-day prediction error reached 1.79 µg/m3. Finally, using genetic algorithm, data for day of week, month of year, topography, wind direction, maximum temperature and pollutant rate of the two nearest neighbors were identified as the most effective parameters in the prediction of air pollution.

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Precipitation and deposition of asphaltene cause number of severe problems in downstream and upstream of oil industry. Hence, it is essential to present a dependable model for quantitative estimation of asphaltene precipitation. This paper aims to introduce a hybrid support vector regression (SVR) with harmony search (HS) as an intelligence approach to create quantitative formulation between amount of asphaltene precipitation and titration data. Harmony search is combined with SVR for determining the optimal value of its user-defined parameters. The optimization implementation by HS significantly improves the generalization capability of SVR. A dataset that includes 176 data points was employed in the current study, while 141 data points were utilized for constructing the model and the remainder data points (35 data points) were used for assessment of degree of accuracy and robustness. Evaluating the performance of constructed model based on statistical criteria indicates that the hybrid model has acceptable accuracy to estimate the amount of asphaltene precipitation from titration data. This study concludes that optimization of SVR with HS produces a smart hybrid model, which is an appropriate solution for modeling of the asphaltene precipitation.

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