Efficient Detection of Environmental Violators: A Big Data Approach

Abstract

The detection of environmental violators is critical to the long-term adoption of sustainability in supply chain management. However, there exist manufacturing facilities that report false environmental monitoring data, thereby seriously hampering governments’ efforts to identify true offenders and to properly intervene. We integrate waste gas data from the world’s largest Continuous Emission Monitoring System (CEMS) with a publicly available Violation and Punishment Dataset (VPD) to build prediction models for the identification of environmental violators. We utilize and create innovative machine learning approaches to overcome analytical challenges associated with empirical data. First, we use a feature engineering approach to generate features from the raw, and possibly fraudulent, reporting data. This overcomes the challenges associated with low fidelity, irregularity, and the presence of extreme values in the raw dataset. Second, while building prediction models, we develop new approaches to positive and unlabeled learning to overcome the challenges posed by sparsity and mislabeled data. Our prediction model achieves satisfactory results in a related field test. Our study develops new techniques for big data analytics, which greatly improve the efficiency and effectiveness in detection of environmental violators and enhance operational outcomes of environmental protection agencies. This research is a joint effort between academia and practitioners, as evidenced by the participation of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment of People’s Republic of China. The Ministry kindly granted us direct data access, as well as opportunities to interview Subject Matter Experts at the Ministry, which led to research insights incorporated in this manuscript. Our research findings have global implications, as CEMS devices are universally adopted to monitor waste gas emissions. This is a postprint of the published article.

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Chang, X., Huang, Y., Li, M., Bo, X. and Kumar, S. (2021), Efficient Detection of Environmental Violators: A Big Data Approach. Prod Oper Manag, 30: 1246-1270. https://doi.org/10.1111/poms.13272, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/poms.13272. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. This article may not be enhanced, enriched or otherwise transformed into a derivative work, without express permission from Wiley or by statutory rights under applicable legislation. Copyright notices must not be removed, obscured or modified. The article must be linked to Wiley’s version of record on Wiley Online Library and any embedding, framing or otherwise making available the article or pages thereof by third parties from platforms, services and websites other than Wiley Online Library must be prohibited.