A Method for Selecting the Appropriate Source Domain Buildings for Building Energy Prediction in Transfer Learning: Using the Euclidean Distance and Pearson Coefficient

Chuyi Luo, Liang Xia and Sung-Hugh Hong ()
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Chuyi Luo: Department of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, 199 East Taikang Road, Ningbo 315100, China
Liang Xia: Department of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, 199 East Taikang Road, Ningbo 315100, China
Sung-Hugh Hong: Department of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, 199 East Taikang Road, Ningbo 315100, China

Energies, 2025, vol. 18, issue 14, 1-27

Abstract: Building energy prediction faces challenges such as data scarcity while Transfer Learning (TL) demonstrates significant potential by leveraging source building energy data to enhance target building energy prediction. However, the accuracy of TL heavily relies on selecting appropriate source buildings as the source data. This study proposes a novel, easy-to-understand, statistics-based visualization method that combines the Euclidean distance and Pearson correlation coefficient for selecting source buildings in TL for target building electricity prediction. Long Short-Term Memory, the Gated Recurrent Unit, and the Convolutional Neural Network were applied to verify the appropriateness of the source domain buildings. The results showed the source building, selected via the method proposed by this research, could reduce 65% of computational costs, while the RMSE was approximately 6.5 kWh, and the R 2 was around 0.92. The method proposed in this study is well suited for scenes requiring rapid response times and exhibiting low tolerance for prediction errors.

Keywords: transfer learning; Pearson correlation coefficient; Euclidean distance; data-driven method; deep learning; long short-term memory; gated recurrent unit; convolutional neural network (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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