Identifying key variables and interactions in statistical models of building energy consumption using regularization

This paper therefore makes two main contributions to the modeling and analysis of energy consumption of buildings. First, it introduces regularization, also known as penalized regression, for principled selection of variables and interactions. Second, this approach is demonstrated by application to a comprehensive dataset of energy consumption for commercial office and multifamily buildings in New York City. Using cross-validation, this paper finds that a newly-developed method, hierarchical group-lasso regularization, significantly outperforms ridge, lasso, elastic net and ordinary least squares approaches in terms of prediction accuracy; develops a parsimonious model for large New York City buildings; and identifies several interactions between technical and non-technical parameters for further analysis, policy development and targeting. This method is generalizable to other local contexts, and is likely to be useful for the modeling of other sectors of energy consumption as well.