Air pollutant forecasting can be used to quantitatively estimate pollutant reduction trends. Combining bibliometrics with the evolutionary tree and Markov chain methods can achieve a superior quantitative analysis of research hotspots and trends. In this work, we adopted a bibliometric method to review the research status of statistical prediction methods for air pollution, used evolutionary trees to analyze the development trend of such research, and applied the Markov chain to predict future research trends for major air pollutants. The results indicate that papers mainly focused on the effects of air pollution on human diseases, urban pollution exposure models, and land use regression (LUR) methods. Particulate matter (PM), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and ozone (O₃) were the most investigated pollutants. Artificial neural network (ANN) methods were preferred in studies of PM and O₃, while LUR were more widely used in studies of NOx. Additionally, multi-method hybrid techniques gradually became the most widely used approach between 2010 and 2018. In the future, the statistical prediction of air pollution is expected to be based on a mixed method to simultaneously predict multiple pollutants, and the interaction between pollutants will be the most challenging aspect of research on air pollution prediction. The research results summarized in this paper provide technical support for the accurate prediction of atmospheric pollution and the emergency management of regional air quality.