Climate-Sensitive Staged Predictive Framework for Sustainable Residential Retrofit Assessment Using Adaptable Base Model Templates

Residential building retrofit requires reliable building energy simulation and efficient performance prediction. This research presents an adaptable workflow for establishing two residential base model templates, namely corner space (CS) and intermediate space (IS). The models were assessed through National Construction Code of Australia-based verification, comparison with a documented Melbourne residential reference model, and Morris index convergence analysis. These models were coupled with an AI-assisted three-stage prediction framework and evaluated across seven additional Australian climates, with Melbourne as the primary case, to examine cross-climate applicability. Stage 1 developed a two-variable analytical model to predict annual energy consumption. Stage 2 extended this to a three-variable relation and compared its energy predictions with support vector machine (SVM). Stage 3 examined multivariable cases using four machine learning (ML) models—artificial neural network (ANN), SVM, random forest (RF), and decision tree (DT)—to predict performance metrics and identify the best model. For the primary Melbourne case, the two-variable relation reproduced the simulated response with mean absolute percentage errors (MAPEs) of 0.27% and 0.62% for CS and IS, respectively. In Stage 2, the analytical model achieved a MAPE of 8.38%, while SVM reduced the error to 0.75%. Cross-climate results confirmed that the staged workflow remained robust across different climates. In Stage 3, SVM was robust with limited data, while the ANN and RF became more competitive with larger samples. DT was prone to overfitting. The proposed framework supports early-stage residential retrofit assessment by enabling retrofit hotspot screening and suitable surrogate model selection before detailed optimization.