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Conformal PM2.5 Mapping Under Spatial Covariate Shift: Satellite-Reanalysis Fusion for Africa's Green Industrial Transition

cs.LG updates on arXiv.org
Yaw Osei Adjei (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana), Davis Opoku (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana), Ephraim Abotsi (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana), Kwadwo Owusu Amanqua (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana), Oliver Kornyo (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana), Elisha Soglo-Ahianyo (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana), Cephas Anertey Abbey (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana)

arXiv:2604.22787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Africa's green industrialization imperative demands reliable infrastructure for monitoring air quality. We present a satellite-reanalysis PM2.5 fusion system trained on 2,068,901 records from 404 monitoring locations in 29 African countries (OpenAQ, 2017-2022), combining LightGBM with leakage-resistant spatial cross-validation and conformal prediction to quantify predictions and their geographic applicability limits. Under 5-fold location-grouped spatial cross-validation, LightGBM achieves RMSE = 30.83 +/- 5.07 ug/m3, MAE = 14.54 +/- 1.66 ug/m3, R2 = 0.134 +/- 0.023, and macro F1 = 0.336 +/- 0.018. This R2 is substantially below random-split benchmarks (>0.90) but reflects true geographic generalisation difficulty rather than model failure. Split conformal prediction targeting 90% marginal coverage reveals severe East Africa degradation (actual PICP = 65.3% vs. nominal 90%), consistent with medium-strength covariate shift (humidity KS = 0.2237, sat_pblh KS = 0.2558). We operationalise these findings through regional reliability flags (High/Medium/Low/Unreliable) and a monitor prioritisation score directing infrastructure expansion toward highest-burden unmonitored populations, directly supporting Africa's green industrial transition and SDGs 3.9, 7.1.2, 9, 11.6.2, and 13.