Andrej Čampa

Carolina Fortuna, Din Mušić, Gregor Cerar et al.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are moving from customized deployments in specific domains towards generic solutions horizontally permeating vertical domains and industries. For instance, decisions on when to perform maintenance of roads or bridges or how to optimize public lighting in view of costs and safety in smart cities are increasingly informed by AI models. While various commercial solutions offer user friendly and easy to use AI as a Service (AIaaS), functionality-wise enabling the democratization of such ecosystems, open-source equivalent ecosystems are lagging behind. In this chapter, we discuss AIaaS functionality and corresponding technology stack and analyze possible realizations using open source user friendly technologies that are suitable for on-premise set-ups of small and medium sized users allowing full control over the data and technological platform without any third-party dependence or vendor lock-in.

Gregor Cerar, Blaž Bertalanič, Anže Pirnat et al.

The digital transformation of the energy infrastructure enables new, data driven, applications often supported by machine learning models. However, domain specific data transformations, pre-processing and management in modern data driven pipelines is yet to be addressed. In this paper we perform a first time study on generic data models that are able to support designing feature management solutions that are the most important component in developing ML-based energy applications. We first propose a taxonomy for designing data models suitable for energy applications, explain how this model can support the design of features and their subsequent management by specialized feature stores. Using a short-term forecasting dataset, we show the benefits of designing richer data models and engineering the features on the performance of the resulting models. Finally, we benchmark three complementary feature management solutions, including an open-source feature store suitable for time series.

Carolina Fortuna, Gregor Cerar, Blaz Bertalanic et al.

The transition from traditional power grids to smart grids, significant increase in the use of renewable energy sources, and soaring electricity prices has triggered a digital transformation of the energy infrastructure that enables new, data driven, applications often supported by machine learning models. However, the majority of the developed machine learning models rely on univariate data. To date, a structured study considering the role meta-data and additional measurements resulting in multivariate data is missing. In this paper we propose a taxonomy that identifies and structures various types of data related to energy applications. The taxonomy can be used to guide application specific data model development for training machine learning models. Focusing on a household electricity forecasting application, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed taxonomy in guiding the selection of the features for various types of models. As such, we study of the effect of domain, contextual and behavioral features on the forecasting accuracy of four interpretable machine learning techniques and three openly available datasets. Finally, using a feature importance techniques, we explain individual feature contributions to the forecasting accuracy.