A personal thermal comfort model based on causal artificial intelligence: a physiological sensor-enabled causal identifiability.

Abstract

Personal thermal comfort affects occupants' health, well-being, and productivity. Its satisfaction is subjective, based on individual characteristics and dynamic environments, and challenging to understand, requiring predicted outcomes and explanations of how and why the outcomes happen. This research fulfills this concern using a personal thermal comfort model based on causal artificial intelligence. It encodes personal thermal comfort satisfaction based on a new causal-and-effect framework to connect the human mind and environmental factors. Random variables encode relevant factors, and the structural causal model performs cause-and-effect relationships. The do-calculus (e.g., d-separated and d-connected) draws the common sense of the model based on causal structure representation, contributing to a human-intelligent understanding. A directed acyclic graph and exact-inference-based variable elimination quantify the model parameters based on real-world observational data. The strength of causal relationships is verified based on causal odd ratio, causal sensitivity, and causal impact. The results highlight that our proposed model can encode physiological and physical factors to predict and explain personal thermal comfort satisfaction. It can predict and explain such satisfaction reasonably and robustly, converging to human-like interpretation. It can be applied to intelligent systems to understand personal thermal comfort.