Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

1-2022

Abstract

In late 2019, ASHRAE hosted the Great Energy Predictor III (GEPIII) machine learning competition on the Kaggle platform. This launch marked the third energy prediction competition from ASHRAE and the first since the mid-1990s. In this updated version, the competitors were provided with over 20 million points of training data from 2,380 energy meters collected for 1,448 buildings from 16 sources. This competition’s overall objective was to find the most accurate modeling solutions for the prediction of over 41 million private and public test data points. The competition had 4,370 participants, split across 3,614 teams from 94 countries who submitted 39,403 predictions. In addition to the top five winning workflows, the competitors publicly shared 415 reproducible online machine learning workflow examples (notebooks), including over 40 additional, full solutions. This paper gives a high-level overview of the competition preparation and dataset, competitors and their discussions, machine learning workflows and models generated, winners and their submissions, discussion of lessons learned, and competition outputs and next steps. The most popular and accurate machine learning workflows used large ensembles of mostly gradient boosting tree models, such as LightGBM. Similar to the first predictor competition, preprocessing of the data sets emerged as a key differentiator.

Discipline

Energy Policy | Engineering

Research Areas

Integrative Research Areas

Publication

Science and Technology for the Built Environment

Volume

26

Issue

10

First Page

1

Last Page

21

ISSN

2374-4731

Identifier

10.1080/23744731.2020.1795514

Publisher

Taylor and Francis Group

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1080/23744731.2020.1795514

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