A Data-Efficient Building Electricity Load Forecasting Method Based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy and Improved TrAdaBoost Algorithm

Building electricity load forecasting plays an important role in building energy management, peak demand and power grid security. In the past two decades, a large number of data-driven models have been applied to building and larger-scale energy consumption predictions. Although these models have been successful in specific cases, their performances would be greatly affected by the quantity and quality of the building data. Moreover, for older buildings with sparse data, or new buildings with no historical data, accurate predictions are difficult to achieve. Aiming at such a data silos problem caused by the insufficient data collection in the building energy consumption prediction, this study proposes a building electricity load forecasting method based on a similarity judgement and an improved TrAdaBoost algorithm (iTrAdaBoost). The Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) is used to search similar building samples related to the target building from public datasets. Different from general Boosting algorithms, the proposed iTrAdaBoost algorithm iteratively updates the weights of the similar building samples and combines them together with the target building samples for a prediction accuracy improvement. An educational building’s case study is carried out in this paper. The results show that even when the target and source samples belong to different domains, i.e., the geographical location and meteorological condition of the buildings are different, the proposed MMD-iTradaBoost method has a better prediction accuracy in the transfer learning process than the BP or traditional AdaBoost models. In addition, compared with other advanced deep learning models, the proposed method has a simple structure and is easy for engineering implementation.