Neural Methods Comparison for Prediction of Heating Energy Based on Few Hundreds Enhanced Buildings in Four Season’s Climate

Abstract

Sustainable development and the increasing demand for equitable energy use as well as the reduction of waste of energy are the author’s social and scientific motivations. This new paradigm is the selection of a pertinent methodology to evaluate the efficiency of habitat thermomodernization, which is one of the scientific tasks of the presented study. In order to meet the social and scientific requirements, 380 buildings from the end of the last century (made of large plate technology), which were thermally improved at the beginning of the XXI century, were designed for a comparative analysis of the predictive modelling of heating energy consumption. A specific set of important variables characterizing the examined buildings has been identified. Groups of variables were used to estimate the energy consumption in such a way as to achieve a compromise between the difficulty of obtaining them and the quality of forecast. To predict energy consumption, the six most appropriate neural methods were used: artificial neural networks (ANN), general regression trees (CART), exhaustive regression trees (CHAID), support regression trees (SRT), support vectors (SV), and method multivariant adaptive regression splines (MARS). The quality assessment of the developed models used the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) also known as mean absolute percentage deviation (MAPD), as well as mean bias error (MBE), coefficient of variance of the root mean square error (CV RMSE) and coefficient of determination (R2), which are accepted as statistical calibration standards by (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) ASHRAE. On this basis, the most effective method has been chosen, which gives the best results and therefore allows to forecast with great precision the energy consumption (after thermal improvement) for this type of residential building.