Uncertainty-Aware Transfer Learning for Cross-Building Energy Forecasting: Toward Robust and Scalable District-Level Energy Management
For district-level energy management, this work provides a scalable and robust method to transfer forecasting models across buildings with minimal target data and reliable uncertainty estimates.
The paper proposes an uncertainty-aware transfer learning framework for cross-building energy forecasting using the Temporal Fusion Transformer, achieving a prediction interval coverage probability of 93.2% and showing that Probe-Only fine-tuning (updating only 455 of 806K parameters) yields the best transfer quality (TRI = 3,097).
Scaling data-driven energy forecasting to district level requires models that can be re-used across buildings with minimal target-domain data and honest uncertainty estimates. We present an uncertainty-aware transfer learning (TL) framework for cross-building energy forecasting based on the Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT), evaluated on a newly released high-resolution real sub-meter dataset: an educational building at Aalborg University, Denmark (source) and the multi-typology NEST building at EMPA, Switzerland (target). We introduce the Transfer Robustness Index (TRI), an architecture-agnostic metric for quantifying generalization quality across domain gaps. A four-strategy layer-freezing ablation shows that Probe-Only fine-tuning, updating only 455 output-layer parameters out of 806K, achieves the best transfer quality (TRI = 3,097), outperforming full fine-tuning and suggesting that TFT encoders learn transferable temporal representations. Monte Carlo Dropout yields a prediction interval coverage probability of 93.2%, close to the nominal 95% target. A data-scarcity analysis further shows monotonic improvement with increasing target-domain data, providing practical guidance for district energy deployment.