Energy Consumption Prediction in Residential Buildings—An Accurate and Interpretable Machine Learning Approach Combining Fuzzy Systems with Evolutionary Optimization

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of accurate and interpretable prediction of energy consumption in residential buildings. The solution that we propose in this work employs the knowledge discovery machine learning approach combining fuzzy systems with evolutionary optimization. The contribution of this work is twofold, including both methodology and experimental investigations. As far as methodological contribution is concerned, in this paper, we present an original designing procedure of fuzzy rule-based prediction systems (FRBPSs) for accurate and transparent energy consumption prediction in residential buildings. The proposed FRBPSs are characterized by a genetically optimized accuracy–interpretability trade-off. The trade-off optimization is carried out by means of multi-objective evolutionary optimization algorithms—in particular, by our generalization of the well-known strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm 2 (SPEA2). The proposed FRBPSs’ designing procedure is our original extension and generalization (for regression problems operating on continuous outputs) of an approach to designing fuzzy rule-based classifiers (FRBCs) we developed earlier and published in 2020 in this journal. FRBCs operate on discrete outputs, i.e., class labels. The experimental contribution of this work includes designing the collection of FRBPSs for residential building energy consumption prediction using the data set published in 2024 and available from Kaggle Database Repository. Moreover, the comparison with 20 available alternative approaches is carried out, demonstrating that our approach significantly outperforms alternative methods in terms of interpretability and transparency of the energy consumption predictions made while remaining comparable or slightly superior in terms of the accuracy of those predictions.