Network Analyses Reveal Geographically Continuous Elemental Patterns in Municipal Solid Waste Incineration Fly Ash

The composition of municipal solid waste incineration fly ash is influenced by regional waste characteristics, incineration technology, and air pollution control systems. However, systematic characterization of the elemental distribution patterns across large-scale databases remains limited. Therefore, this study constructed a comprehensive dataset of 1439 fly ash samples from multiple countries and Chinese provinces and used integrated statistical analysis, machine learning imputation, and correlation network approaches to reveal the underlying geochemical relationships. Random forest imputation successfully addressed missing data problems (11.7