A review of artificial intelligence based building energy use prediction: Contrasting the capabilities of single and ensemble prediction models

Building energy use prediction plays an important role in building energy management and conservation as it can help us to evaluate building energy efficiency, conduct building commissioning, and detect and diagnose building system faults. Building energy prediction can be broadly classified into engineering, Artificial Intelligence (AI) based, and hybrid approaches. While engineering and hybrid approaches use thermodynamic equations to estimate energy use, the AI-based approach uses historical data to predict future energy use under constraints. Owing to the ease of use and adaptability to seek optimal solutions in a rapid manner, the AI-based approach has gained popularity in recent years. For this reason and to discuss recent developments in the AI-based approaches for building energy use prediction, this paper conducts an in-depth review of single AI-based methods such as multiple linear regression, artificial neural networks, and support vector regression, and ensemble prediction method that, by combining multiple single AI-based prediction models improves the prediction accuracy manifold. This paper elaborates the principles, applications, advantages and limitations of these AI-based prediction methods and concludes with a discussion on the future directions of the research on AI-based methods for building energy use prediction.