Eduardo Luiz Alba

Eduardo Luiz Alba, Gilson Adamczuk Oliveira, Matheus Henrique Dal Molin Ribeiro et al.

Electricity expense management presents significant challenges, as this resource is susceptible to various influencing factors. In universities, the demand for this resource is rapidly growing with institutional expansion and has a significant environmental impact. In this study, the machine learning models long short-term memory (LSTM), random forest (RF), support vector regression (SVR), and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) were trained with historical consumption data from the Federal Institute of Paraná (IFPR) over the last seven years and climatic variables to forecast electricity consumption 12 months ahead. Datasets from two campuses were adopted. To improve model performance, feature selection was performed using Shapley additive explanations (SHAP), and hyperparameter optimization was carried out using genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The results indicate that the proposed cooperative ensemble learning approach named Weaker Separator Booster (WSB) exhibited the best performance for datasets. Specifically, it achieved an sMAPE of 13.90% and MAE of 1990.87 kWh for the IFPR-Palmas Campus and an sMAPE of 18.72% and MAE of 465.02 kWh for the Coronel Vivida Campus. The SHAP analysis revealed distinct feature importance patterns across the two IFPR campuses. A commonality that emerged was the strong influence of lagged time-series values and a minimal influence of climatic variables.

Eduardo Luiz Alba, Matheus Henrique Dal Molin Ribeiro, Gilson Adamczuk et al.

Educational institutions are essential for economic and social development. Budget cuts in Brazil in recent years have made it difficult to carry out their activities and projects. In the case of expenses with water and electricity, unexpected situations can occur, such as leaks and equipment failures, which make their management challenging. This study proposes a comparison between two machine learning models, Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Regression (SVR), for water and electricity consumption forecasting at the Federal Institute of Paraná-Campus Palmas, with a 12-month forecasting horizon, as well as evaluating the influence of the application of climatic variables as exogenous features. The data were collected over the past five years, combining details pertaining to invoices with exogenous and endogenous variables. The two models had their hyperpa-rameters optimized using the Genetic Algorithm (GA) to select the individuals with the best fitness to perform the forecasting with and without climatic variables. The absolute percentage errors and root mean squared error were used as performance measures to evaluate the forecasting accuracy. The results suggest that in forecasting water and electricity consumption over a 12-step horizon, the Random Forest model exhibited the most superior performance. The integration of climatic variables often led to diminished forecasting accuracy, resulting in higher errors. Both models still had certain difficulties in predicting water consumption, indicating that new studies with different models or variables are welcome.