Enhancing Accuracy of Indoor Air Quality Sensors via Automated Machine Learning Calibration

Abstract. Indoor fine particles (PM2.5) exposure poses significant public health risks, prompting growing use of low-cost sensors for indoor air quality monitoring. However, maintaining data accuracy from these sensors is challenging, due to interference of environmental conditions, such as humidity, and instrument drift. Calibration is essential to ensure the accuracy of these sensors. This study introduces a novel automated machine learning (AutoML)-based calibration framework to enhance the reliability of low-cost indoor PM2.5 measurements. The multi-stage calibration framework connects low-cost field sensors to be deployed with intermediate drift-correction reference sensors and a reference-grade instrument, applying separate calibration models for low (clean air environment) and high (pollution events) concentration ranges. We evaluated the framework in a controlled indoor chamber using two different sensor models exposed to diverse indoor pollution sources under uncontrolled natural ambient conditions. The AutoML-driven calibration significantly improved sensor performance, achieving a strong correlation with reference measurements (R2 > 0.90) and substantially reducing error metrics (with normalized root-mean-square error (NRMSE) and symmetric mean absolute percentage error (sMAPE) roughly halved relative to uncalibrated data). Bias was effectively minimised, yielding calibrated readings closely aligned with the reference instrument. These findings demonstrate that our calibration strategy can convert low-cost sensors into a more reliable tool for indoor air pollution monitoring. The improved data quality supports atmospheric science research by enabling more accurate indoor PM2.5 monitoring, and informs public health interventions and evaluation by facilitating better indoor exposure assessment.