Random forests and artificial neural network for predicting daylight illuminance and energy consumption

Ahmad, Muhammad ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7269-4369, Hippolyte, Jean-Laurent ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5263-2881, Mourshed, Monjur ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8347-1366 and Rezgui, Yacine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5711-8400 2017. Random forests and artificial neural network for predicting daylight illuminance and energy consumption. Presented at: Building Simulation 2017: 15th Conference of International Building Performance Simulation Association, San Francisco, CA, USA, 7-9 August 2017. Published in: Barnaby, Charles S. and Wetter, Michael eds. Building Simulation 2017. Proceedings of the International Building Performance Simulation Association , vol.15 IBPSA, pp. 1949-1955.

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Abstract

Predicting energy consumption and daylight illuminance plays an important part in building lighting control strategies. The use of simplified or data-driven methods is often preferred where a fast response is needed e.g. as a performance evaluation engine for advanced real-time control and optimization applications. In this paper we developed and then compared the performance of the widely-used Artificial Neural Network (ANN) with Random Forest (RF), a recently developed ensemble-based algorithm. The target application was predicting the hourly energy consumption and daylight illuminance values of a classroom in Cardiff, UK. Overall, RF performed better than ANN for predicting daylight illuminance; with coefficients of determination (R^2) of 0.9881 and 0.9799 respectively. On the energy consumption testing dataset, ANN performed marginally better than RF with R^2 values of 0.9973 and 0.9966 respectively. RF performs internal cross-validation and is relatively easy to tune as it has few tuning parameters. The paper also highlighted possible future research directions.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Engineering
Subjects:	T Technology > TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General)
Publisher:	IBPSA
ISBN:	978-1-7750520-0-5
ISSN:	2522-2708
Funders:	European Research Council
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	27 March 2018
Last Modified:	19 Feb 2023 15:20
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/100415

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