Personalized federated learning for buildings energy consumption forecasting

Buildings' energy consumption forecasting is critical for energy saving and building maintenance. However, most studies only focus on centralized learning of one dataset, which ignores the data privacy and data shortage issue. Meanwhile, the difference in energy data distributions from many buildings causes difficulties in training a good machine learning model. Although these two challenges of data privacy and data heterogeneity could be resolved through personalized federated learning algorithms to some degree, there is still a lack of investigation into applying these algorithms to building energy data analytics. Besides using existing personalized federated learning algorithms, we design a new deep learning model through a mixture of experts to support personalization for heterogeneous data distribution. This new design is the first trial to tackle the data heterogeneity through ensemble architecture in federated load forecasting. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed model with different training algorithms. The results show that our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art models in energy forecasting accuracies by 10% to 40% across the buildings' energy data from university campuses.