Model Failure or Data Corruption? Exploring Inconsistencies in Building Energy Ratings with Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning
This addresses data quality issues in BER assessments for building owners, policymakers, and urban planners, but is incremental as it applies an existing method to a new domain.
The study tackled inconsistencies in Building Energy Rating (BER) assessments by introducing CLEAR, a data-driven approach using self-supervised contrastive learning, and uncovered evidence of inconsistent assessments and data corruption in an Irish building dataset.
Building Energy Rating (BER) stands as a pivotal metric, enabling building owners, policymakers, and urban planners to understand the energy-saving potential through improving building energy efficiency. As such, enhancing buildings' BER levels is expected to directly contribute to the reduction of carbon emissions and promote climate improvement. Nonetheless, the BER assessment process is vulnerable to missing and inaccurate measurements. In this study, we introduce \texttt{CLEAR}, a data-driven approach designed to scrutinize the inconsistencies in BER assessments through self-supervised contrastive learning. We validated the effectiveness of \texttt{CLEAR} using a dataset representing Irish building stocks. Our experiments uncovered evidence of inconsistent BER assessments, highlighting measurement data corruption within this real-world dataset.