Predicting future hourly residential electrical consumption: A machine learning case study

Traditional whole building energy modeling suffers from several factors, including the large number of inputs required for building characterization, simplifying assumptions, and the gap between the as-designed and as-built building. Prior work has attempted to mitigate these problems by using sensor-based machine learning approaches to statistically model energy consumption, applying the techniques primarily to commercial building data, which makes use of hourly consumption data. It is unclear, however, whether these techniques can translate to residential buildings, since the energy usage patterns may vary significantly. Until now, most residential modeling research only had access to monthly electrical consumption data. In this article, we report on the evaluation of seven different machine learning algorithms applied to a new residential data set that contains sensor measurements collected every 15 min, with the objective of determining which techniques are most successful for predicting next hour residential building consumption. We first validate each learner's correctness on the ASHRAE Great Energy Prediction Shootout, confirming existing conclusions that Neural Network-based methods perform best on commercial buildings. However, our additional results show that these methods perform poorly on residential data, and that Least Squares Support Vector Machines perform best - a technique not previously applied to this domain.