Hybrid data driven/thermal simulation model for comfort assessment

Abstract

Machine learning models improve the speed and quality of physical models. However, they require a large amount of data, which is often difficult and costly to acquire. Predicting thermal comfort, for example, requires a controlled environment, with participants presenting various characteristics (age, gender, ...). This paper proposes a method for hybridizing real data with simulated data for thermal comfort prediction. The simulations are performed using Modelica Language. A benchmarking study is realized to compare different machine learning methods. Obtained results look very promising with an F1 score of 0.999 obtained using the random forest model.