Abstract
This paper proposes an IoT and machine learning (ML)-based novel method to estimate the air quality index (AQI) using traffic data in real-time. With the help of particulate matter (PM) monitoring nodes deployed in fifteen locations with diverse traffic scenarios of Indian roads, and using digital map service providers, a rich traffic dataset with approximately 210,000 samples has been collected. Three different ML models, namely random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and multi-layer perceptron (MLP), are trained on this dataset to predict the AQI category into five levels. The experimental results show an accuracy of 82.60% with the F1-score of 83.67% on the complete dataset. Apart from this, ML models were also trained on individual node datasets, and the behavior of AQI levels was observed.