Low-Cost Sensor Calibration for Indoor Air Quality Monitoring: A Dataset, Evaluation Scenarios, and a Lightweight Model

Abstract

Low-cost sensors enable scalable indoor air quality monitoring but require calibration because of nonlinear distortions, noise, and temporal drift. The conventional strict pairwise calibration setting requires a co-located reference sensor at each deployment location and does not account for spatial and temporal heterogeneity. To address these limitations, we introduce a six-month dataset comprising multivariate indoor air-quality measurements from low-cost and reference sensors with contextual metadata collected at five locations. Using this dataset, we define four evaluation scenarios. The reference-efficient and location-transfer scenarios evaluate spatial generalization, whereas the long-term drift and event-conditioned scenarios assess robustness to gradual and abrupt distribution shifts. Based on these scenarios, we derive design requirements and propose a lightweight temporal model that combines input-window compression with residual temporal and feature fusion. Experiments show strong calibration performance across all four scenarios with low edge-inference cost.