Directional dependence between major cities in China based on copula regression on air pollution measurements

Jong Min Kim, Namgil Lee, Xingyao Xiao

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Air pollution is well-known as a major risk to public health, causing various diseases including pulmonary and cardiovascular diseases. As social concern increases, the amount of air pollution data is increasing rapidly. The purpose of this study is to statistically characterize dependence between major cities in China based on a measure of directional dependence estimated from PM2.5 measurements. As a measure of the directional dependence, we propose the so-called copula directional dependence (CDD) using beta regression models. An advantage of the CDD is that it does not rely on strict assumptions of specific probability distributions or linearity. We used hourly PM2.5 measurement data collected at four major cities in China: Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, and Shanghai, from 2013 to 2017. After accounting for autocorrelation in the PM2.5 time series via nonlinear autoregressive models, CDDs between the four cities were estimated to produce directed network structures of statistical dependence. In addition, a statistical method was proposed to test the directionality of dependence between each pair of cities. From the PM2.5 data, we could discover that Chengdu and Guangzhou are the most closely related cities and that the directionality between them has changed once during 2013 to 2017, which implies a major economic or environmental change in these Chinese regions.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article numbere0213148
JournalPloS one
Volume14
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2019

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
N. Lee was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MSIT) (No. 2017R1C1B5076912). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Kim et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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