6,100 research outputs found
Energy performance forecasting of residential buildings using fuzzy approaches
The energy consumption used for domestic purposes in Europe is, to a considerable extent, due to heating and cooling. This energy is produced mostly by burning fossil fuels, which has a high negative environmental impact. The characteristics of a building are an important factor to determine the necessities of heating and cooling loads. Therefore, the study of the relevant characteristics of the buildings, regarding the heating and cooling needed to maintain comfortable indoor air conditions, could be very useful in order to design and construct energy-efficient buildings. In previous studies, different machine-learning approaches have been used to predict heating and cooling loads from the set of variables: relative compactness, surface area, wall area, roof area, overall height, orientation, glazing area and glazing area distribution. However, none of these methods are based on fuzzy logic. In this research, we study two fuzzy logic approaches, i.e., fuzzy inductive reasoning (FIR) and adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), to deal with the same problem. Fuzzy approaches obtain very good results, outperforming all the methods described in previous studies except one. In this work, we also study the feature selection process of FIR methodology as a pre-processing tool to select the more relevant variables before the use of any predictive modelling methodology. It is proven that FIR feature selection provides interesting insights into the main building variables causally related to heating and cooling loads. This allows better decision making and design strategies, since accurate cooling and heating load estimations and correct identification of parameters that affect building energy demands are of high importance to optimize building designs and equipment specifications.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Deep Divergence-Based Approach to Clustering
A promising direction in deep learning research consists in learning
representations and simultaneously discovering cluster structure in unlabeled
data by optimizing a discriminative loss function. As opposed to supervised
deep learning, this line of research is in its infancy, and how to design and
optimize suitable loss functions to train deep neural networks for clustering
is still an open question. Our contribution to this emerging field is a new
deep clustering network that leverages the discriminative power of
information-theoretic divergence measures, which have been shown to be
effective in traditional clustering. We propose a novel loss function that
incorporates geometric regularization constraints, thus avoiding degenerate
structures of the resulting clustering partition. Experiments on synthetic
benchmarks and real datasets show that the proposed network achieves
competitive performance with respect to other state-of-the-art methods, scales
well to large datasets, and does not require pre-training steps
The Structure Transfer Machine Theory and Applications
Representation learning is a fundamental but challenging problem, especially
when the distribution of data is unknown. We propose a new representation
learning method, termed Structure Transfer Machine (STM), which enables feature
learning process to converge at the representation expectation in a
probabilistic way. We theoretically show that such an expected value of the
representation (mean) is achievable if the manifold structure can be
transferred from the data space to the feature space. The resulting structure
regularization term, named manifold loss, is incorporated into the loss
function of the typical deep learning pipeline. The STM architecture is
constructed to enforce the learned deep representation to satisfy the intrinsic
manifold structure from the data, which results in robust features that suit
various application scenarios, such as digit recognition, image classification
and object tracking. Compared to state-of-the-art CNN architectures, we achieve
the better results on several commonly used benchmarks\footnote{The source code
is available. https://github.com/stmstmstm/stm }
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