TITLE:
KAN-Transformer Fusion with Mixture of Experts for Temporal Imputation of Spatiotemporal Air Pollution Data
AUTHORS:
Jiawen Ding
KEYWORDS:
Air Quality, Missing Values Imputation, Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN), Transformer, Deep Learning
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Computer and Communications,
Vol.14 No.3,
March
26,
2026
ABSTRACT: Air pollution has become a pressing challenge to global public health and environmental governance. Accurate analysis of pollutant concentrations critically depends on the completeness of monitoring data; however, the widespread presence of missing values in real-world datasets significantly compromises both assessment reliability and predictive performance. To address this issue, this study proposes a three-dimensional time-feature-space model, which integrates a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) with a Transformer architecture, referred to as KT. The KAN module, equipped with an expert mixing mechanism, captures complex nonlinear temporal dynamics of pollutants, which are subsequently processed by the Transformer to model interdependencies among multiple pollutants via self-attention. A spatial feature selection strategy based on Spearman correlation is further employed to extract key spatiotemporal interactions through channel mixing or independent dynamic processing. Empirical evaluation on air quality monitoring data collected in Beijing from January 2023 to October 2024 shows that the proposed model reduces the mean absolute error (MAE) by 1.1% - 17.1% compared with several SOTA benchmark methods. These results clearly demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed approach in estimating complex and incomplete air pollution data.