Conformal PM2.5 Mapping for Africa — Satellite-Reanalysis Fusion
Researchers built a PM2.5 air-quality model trained on 2,068,901 records across 404 monitoring sites in 29 African countries, combining LightGBM with conformal prediction to quantify prediction uncertainty and geographic applicability.
Spatial cross-validation (location-grouped, leakage-resistant) yields R² = 0.134, far below standard random-split benchmarks (>0.90)—but this gap reveals real generalization difficulty, not model failure, when predicting to unseen regions.
Fits teams building robust environmental infrastructure for Africa's green industrialization where reliable uncertainty estimates matter more than inflated accuracy metrics.