Evidence of the correlation between a city’s air pollution and human health through soft computing

Huge quantities of pollutants are released into the atmosphere of many cities every day. These emissions, due to physicochemical conditions, can interact with each other, resulting in additional pollutants such as ozone. The resulting accumulation of pollutants can be dangerous for human health. To date, urban pollution is recognized as one of the main environmental risk factors. This research aims to correlate, through soft computing techniques, namely Artificial Neural Networks and Genetic Programming, the data of the tumours recorded by the Local Health Authority of the city of Benevento, in Italy, with those of the pollutants detected in the air monitoring stations. Such stations can monitor many pollutants, i.e. NO₂, CO, PM₁₀, PM_2.5, O₃ and Benzene (C₆H₆). Assuming possible effects on human health in the medium term, in this work we treat the data relating to pollutants from the 2012–2014 period while, the tumour data, provided by local hospitals, refer to the time interval 2016–2018. The results show a high correlation between the cases of lung tumours and the exceedance of atmospheric particulate matter and ozone. The explicit genetic programming knowledge representation allows also to measure the relevance of each considered pollutant on human health, evidencing the major role of PM₁₀, NO₂ and O₃.