Performance comparison on improved data-driven building energy prediction under data shortage scenarios in four perspectives: Data generation, incremental learning, transfer learning, and physics-informed

Abstract

Accurate building energy predictions (BEPs) are crucial for maintaining a built environment's sustainability and energy systems. Many data-driven BEPs rely heavily on sufficient data. However, circumstances of practical data shortage restrict the application of these data-driven models to information-poor buildings. This study aims to address this research gap by enhancing BEP performance via the consideration of four perspectives: data generation (DG), incremental learning (IL), transfer learning (TL) and physics-informed (PI). Long short-term memory (LSTM) is selected as the baseline model for comparing performance under extreme (target building dataset: 1-week), heavy (4-weeks) and mild (13-weeks) data shortage scenarios with respect to prediction errors, time costs and the Taylor diagram, among others. The implementation algorithms of four LSTM improved models are conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE), crude incremental learning, domain-adversarial neural network and statistics-informed (SI) for DG, IL, TL and PI, respectively. The effectiveness of the four enhanced models was confirmed using the open-source dataset Building Data Genome Project 2. A comprehensive and fair performance comparison recommends CVAE for extreme and heavy data shortage scenarios with average mean absolute per cent error (MAPE) of 12.79 % and 8.63 % as well as performance improvement ratios (PIRs) of 0.45 and 0.57. SI should be recommended for mild data shortage scenarios with MAPE of 8.01 % and PIR of 0.66.