Transfer learning and source domain restructuring-based BiLSTM approach for building energy consumption prediction

Currently, building energy consumption prediction typically relies on vast amounts of historical data. However, for newly constructed buildings, the scarcity of data leads to reduced prediction accuracy. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel approach that integrates transfer learning with a source domain reconstruction-based BiLSTM model for building energy consumption prediction. In the first stage, both source and target domains are clustered into profile types using k-means. For each profile type in the target domain, the most similar profiles in the source domain are identified using Maximum Mean Discrepancy and Dynamic Time Warping. The source domain is then reconstructed by combining these identified profiles based on their proportions in the target domain. Subsequently, a feature extraction method based on EMD-CWT-Conv is introduced. Empirical Mode Decomposition is first applied to decompose and filter the source domain data. Continuous Wavelet Transform is then employed to extract distinctive frequency-domain and time-domain features from both the reconstructed source domain and the target domain. Final predictions are made using transfer learning and fine-tuning. Experiments on a grocery shop and a school show that the proposed approach reduces Mean Absolute Percentage Error by at least 13.19% and 17.67%, respectively.