Prediction of Energy Consumption of an Administrative Building using Machine Learning and Statistical Methods

Energy management is now essential in light of the current energy issues, particularly in the building industry, which accounts for a sizable amount of global energy use. Predicting energy consumption is of great interest in developing an effective energy management strategy. This study aims to prove the outperformance of machine learning models over SARIMA models in predicting heating energy usage in an administrative building in Chefchaouen City, Morocco. It also highlights the effectiveness of SARIMA models in predicting energy with limited data size in the training phase. The prediction is carried out using machine learning (artificial neural networks, bagging trees, boosting trees, and support vector machines) and statistical methods (14 SARIMA models). To build the models, external temperature, internal temperature, solar radiation, and the factor of time are selected as model inputs. Building energy simulation is conducted in the TRNSYS environment to generate a database for the training and validation of the models. The models' performances are compared based on three statistical indicators: normalized root mean square error (nRMSE), mean average error (MAE), and correlation coefficient (R). The results show that all studied models have good accuracy, with a correlation coefficient of 0.90 < R < 0.97. The artificial neural network outperforms all other models (R=0.97, nRMSE=12.60%, MAE= 0.19 kWh). Although machine learning methods, in general terms, seemingly outperform statistical methods, it is worth noting that SARIMA models reached good prediction accuracy without requiring too much data in the training phase. Doi: 10.28991/CEJ-2023-09-05-01 Full Text: PDF