Due to the availability of smart metering infrastructure, high-resolution electric consumption data is readily available to study the dynamics of residential electric consumption at finely resolved spatial and temporal scales. Analyzing the electric consumption data enables the policymakers and building owners to understand consumer’s demand-consumption behaviors. Furthermore, analysis and accurate forecasting of electric consumption are substantial for consumer involvement in time-of-use tariffs, critical peak pricing, and consumer-specific demand response initiatives. Alongside its vast economic and sustainability implications, such as energy wastage and decarbonization of the energy sector, accurate consumption forecasting facilitates power system planning and stable grid operations. Energy consumption forecasting is an active research area; despite the abundance of devised models, electric consumption forecasting in residential buildings remains challenging due to high occupant energy use behavior variability. Hence the search for an appropriate model for accurate electric consumption forecasting is ever continuing. To this aim, this paper presents a spatial and temporal ensemble forecasting model for short-term electric consumption forecasting. The proposed work involves exploring electric consumption profiles at the apartment level through cluster analysis based on the k-means algorithm. The ensemble forecasting model consists of two deep learning models; Long Short-Term Memory Unit (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). First, the apartment-level historical electric consumption data is clustered. Later the clusters are aggregated based on consumption profiles of consumers. At the building and floor level, the ensemble models are trained using aggregated electric consumption data. The proposed ensemble model forecasts the electric consumption at three spatial scales apartment, building, and floor level for hourly, daily, and weekly forecasting horizon. Furthermore, the impact of spatial-temporal granularity and cluster analysis on the prediction accuracy is analyzed. The dataset used in this study comprises high-resolution electric consumption data acquired through smart meters recorded on an hourly basis over the period of one year. The consumption data belongs to four multifamily residential buildings situated in an urban area of South Korea. To prove the effectiveness of our proposed forecasting model, we compared our model with widely known machine learning models and deep learning variants. The results achieved by our proposed ensemble scheme verify that model has learned the sequential behavior of electric consumption by producing superior performance with the lowest MAPE of 4.182 and 4.54 at building and floor level prediction, respectively. The experimental findings suggest that the model has efficiently captured the dynamic electric consumption characteristics to exploit ensemble model diversities and achieved lower forecasting error. The proposed ensemble forecasting scheme is well suited for predictive modeling and short-term load forecasting.

With the development of modern power systems (smart grid), energy consumption prediction becomes an essential aspect of resource planning and operations. In the last few decades, industrial and commercial buildings have thoroughly been investigated for consumption patterns. However, due to the unavailability of data, the residential buildings could not get much attention. During the last few years, many solutions have been devised for predicting electric consumption; however, it remains a challenging task due to the dynamic nature of residential consumption patterns. Therefore, a more robust solution is required to improve the model performance and achieve a better prediction accuracy. This paper presents an ensemble approach based on learning to a statistical model to predict the short-term energy consumption of a multifamily residential building. Our proposed approach utilizes Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Kalman Filter (KF) to build an ensemble prediction model to predict short term energy demands of multifamily residential buildings. The proposed approach uses real energy data acquired from the multifamily residential building, South Korea. Different statistical measures are used, such as mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and R2 score, to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach and compare it with existing models. The experimental results reveal that the proposed approach predicts accurately and outperforms the existing models. Furthermore, a comparative analysis is performed to evaluate and compare the proposed model with conventional machine learning models. The experimental results show the effectiveness and significance of the proposed approach compared to existing energy prediction models. The proposed approach will support energy management to effectively plan and manage the energy supply and demands of multifamily residential buildings.

Drilling data for groundwater extraction incur changes over time due to variations in hydrogeological and weather conditions. At any time, if there is a need to deploy a change in drilling operations, drilling companies keep monitoring the time-series drilling data to make sure it is not introducing any changes or new errors. Therefore, a solution is needed to predict groundwater levels (GWL) and detect a change in boreholes data to improve drilling efficiency. The proposed study presents an ensemble GWL prediction (E-GWLP) model using boosting and bagging models based on stacking techniques to predict GWL for enhancing hydraulic resource management and planning. The proposed research study consists of two modules; descriptive analysis of boreholes data and GWL prediction model using ensemble model based on stacking. First, descriptive analysis techniques, such as correlation analysis and difference mechanisms, are applied to investigate boreholes log data for extracting underlying characteristics, which is critical for enhancing hydraulic resource management. Second, an ensemble prediction model is developed based on multiple hydrological patterns using robust machine learning (ML) techniques to predict GWL for enhancing drilling efficiency and water resource management. The architecture of the proposed ensemble model involves three boosting algorithms as base models (level-0) and a bagging algorithm as a meta-model that combines the base models predictions (level-1). The base models consist of the following boosting algorithms; eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting (GB). The meta-model includes Random Forest (RF) as a bagging algorithm referred to as a level-1 model. Furthermore, different evaluation metrics are used, including mean absolute error (MAE), mean square error (MSE), and root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and R2 score. The performance of the proposed E-GWLP model is compared with existing ensemble and baseline models. The experimental results reveal that the proposed model performed accurately in respect of MAE, MSE, and RMSE of 0.340, 0.564, and 0.751, respectively. The MAPE and R2 score of our proposed approach is 12.658 and 0.976, respectively, which signifies the importance of our work. Moreover, experimental results suggest that E-GWLP model is suitable for sustainable water resource management and improves reservoir engineering.

Water is an essential source of life for every living thing, and drilling is the only source to gain water from underground. Different advanced technologies have been used to minimize the time factor and labor force. Along with technology to be used, some other factors are equally essential to be considered, like water level, the hardness level of the land, and the number of days spent on the whole process. The study proposed a weighted voting classifier based on Differential Evaluation (DE) to classify the regions with different soil colors and land layers. The weights are assigned to the candidate classifiers based on their performance for each class. For the assignment of the optimal weight, the DE optimization algorithm is used. Moreover, the study presents a chained multi-objective regression model to simultaneously predict the water level and total depth on different locations. The proposed work facilitates the drilling industry to increase the rate of penetration (ROP) by selecting the region with soft soil and land layer. The prediction of depth and water level allows the industry to estimate water levels in different areas at different depths. The dataset is provided by the research organization, which contains information of different drilling points. The results of the proposed weighted voting classifier are compared with the traditional machine learning models (kernel Naive Bayes, Gaussian SVM, Quadratic SVM, and Bilayered Neural network) and state of the art voting classifier in terms of precision, recall, and accuracy. Moreover, the proposed regression model is evaluated by well-known evaluation metrics, including Mean Absolute Error, Mean Square Error, and R2 score. Finally, the comparison verifies the effectiveness of the enhanced optimization-based classifier and multi-objective regressor.

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