Deep learning model based prediction of vehicle CO2 emissions with eXplainable AI integration for sustainable environment

The transportation industry contributes significantly to climate change through carbon dioxide ( $$\hbox {CO}_{2}$$ ) emissions, intensifying global warming and leading to more frequent and severe weather phenomena such as flooding, drought, heat waves, glacier melting, and rising sea levels. This study proposes a comprehensive approach for predicting $$\hbox {CO}_{2}$$ emissions from vehicles using deep learning techniques enhanced by eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods. Utilizing a dataset from the Canadian government’s official open data portal, we explored the impact of various vehicle attributes on $$\hbox {CO}_{2}$$ emissions. Our analysis reveals that not only do high-performance engines emit more pollutants, but fuel consumption under both city and highway conditions also contributes significantly to higher emissions. We identified skewed distributions in the number of vehicles produced by different manufacturers and trends in fuel consumption across fuel types. This study used deep learning techniques to construct a CO2 emission prediction model, specifically a light multilayer perceptron (MLP) architecture called CarbonMLP. The proposed model was optimized by hyperparameter tuning and achieved excellent performance metrics, such as a high R-squared value of 0.9938 and a low Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 0.0002. This study employs XAI approaches, particularly SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), to improve the model interpretation ability and provide information about the importance of features. The findings of this study show that the proposed methodology accurately predicts CO2 emissions from vehicles. Additionally, the analysis suggests areas for further research, such as increasing the dataset, integrating additional pollutants, improving interpretability, and investigating real-world applications. Overall, this study contributes to the design of effective strategies for reducing vehicle CO2 emissions and promoting environmental sustainability.