Forecasting Gas Usage for Big Buildings Using Generalized Additive Models and Deep Learning

Time series behavior of gas consumption is highly irregular, non-stationary, and volatile due to its dependency on the weather, users' habits and lifestyle. This complicates the modeling and forecasting of gas consumption with most of the existing time series modeling techniques, specifically when missing values and outliers are present. To demonstrate and overcome these problems, we investigate two approaches to model the gas consumption, namely Generalized Additive Models (GAM) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). We perform our evaluations on two building datasets from two different continents. We present each selected feature's influence, the tuning parameters, and the characteristics of the gas consumption on their forecasting abilities. We compare the performances of GAM and LSTM with other state-of-the-art forecasting approaches. We show that LSTM outperforms GAM and other existing approaches, however, GAM provides better interpretable results for building management systems (BMS).