Air-Conditioning Load Forecasting for Prosumer Based on Meta Ensemble Learning

Accurate and reliable prediction of air-conditioning load plays a significant role in prosumer energy management system (EMS), because air-conditioning load accounts for a large proportion of the building’s total energy consumption. This paper proposes a new meta ensemble learning method to realize short-term prediction of air-conditioning load for prosumers. This method is a hybrid of meta ensemble learning and stacked auto-encoder (SAE). First, we design multiple different forecasting structures based on SAE to achieve point prediction of air-conditioning loads. SAE is used to learn the deep features in air-conditioning load data. Second, a new meta ensemble learning prediction model is proposed. Meta ensemble learning is used to learn the nonlinear features and invariant structures in data, and determine the coefficients of each SAE-based point forecaster. Finally, the prediction results of each point forecaster are aggregated and integrated to estimate the final air-conditioning load prediction result. Air-conditioning load data from a commercial building in Singapore are used to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating that the proposed meta ensemble learning method is attractive in prosumer energy management.