Engineering topics

Parker, Lynne Edwards

Publications and source records attributed to Parker, Lynne Edwards.

3 records

DOE OSTI2014

Calibrating Building Energy Models Using Supercomputer Trained Machine Learning Agents

Building Energy Modeling (BEM) is an approach to model the energy usage in buildings for design and retrofit purposes. EnergyPlus is the flagship Department of Energy software that performs BEM for different types of buildings. The input to EnergyPlus can often extend in the order of a few thousand parameters which have to be calibrated manually by an expert for realistic energy modeling. This makes it challenging and expensive thereby making building energy modeling unfeasible for smaller projects. In this paper, we describe the Autotune research which employs machine learning algorithms to generate agents for the different kinds of standard reference buildings in the U.S. building stock. The parametric space and the variety of building locations and types make this a challenging computational problem necessitating the use of supercomputers. Millions of EnergyPlus simulations are run on supercomputers which are subsequently used to train machine learning algorithms to generate agents. These agents, once created, can then run in a fraction of the time thereby allowing cost-effective calibration of building models.

Sanyal, Jibonananda↗

DOE OSTI2013

Estimating Building Simulation Parameters via Bayesian Structure Learning

Many key building design policies are made using sophisticated computer simulations such as EnergyPlus (E+), the DOE flagship whole-building energy simulation engine. E+ and other sophisticated computer simulations have several major problems. The two main issues are 1) gaps between the simulation model and the actual structure, and 2) limitations of the modeling engine's capabilities. Currently, these problems are addressed by having an engineer manually calibrate simulation parameters to real world data or using algorithmic optimization methods to adjust the building parameters. However, some simulations engines, like E+, are computationally expensive, which makes repeatedly evaluating the simulation engine costly. This work explores addressing this issue by automatically discovering the simulation's internal input and output dependencies from 20 Gigabytes of E+ simulation data, future extensions will use 200 Terabytes of E+ simulation data. The model is validated by inferring building parameters for E+ simulations with ground truth building parameters. Our results indicate that the model accurately represents parameter means with some deviation from the means, but does not support inferring parameter values that exist on the distribution's tail.

Energy Modeling↗

DOE OSTI2013

Approximate l-fold cross-validation with Least Squares SVM and Kernel Ridge Regression

Kernel methods have difficulties scaling to large modern data sets. The scalability issues are based on computational and memory requirements for working with a large matrix. These requirements have been addressed over the years by using low-rank kernel approximations or by improving the solvers scalability. However, Least Squares Support VectorMachines (LS-SVM), a popular SVM variant, and Kernel Ridge Regression still have several scalability issues. In particular, the O(n^3) computational complexity for solving a single model, and the overall computational complexity associated with tuning hyperparameters are still major problems. We address these problems by introducing an O(n log n) approximate l-fold cross-validation method that uses a multi-level circulant matrix to approximate the kernel. In addition, we prove our algorithm s computational complexity and present empirical runtimes on data sets with approximately 1 million data points. We also validate our approximate method s effectiveness at selecting hyperparameters on real world and standard benchmark data sets. Lastly, we provide experimental results on using a multi-level circulant kernel approximation to solve LS-SVM problems with hyperparameters selected using our method.

Edwards, Richard E↗