Deep-Chain Echo State Network With Explainable Temporal Dependence for Complex Building Energy Prediction

Building energy prediction plays critical roles in the study of green building and smart city. The most challenging issue is to predict energy demand profiles over multiple time steps, which may have inconsistent timescales. Due to complex temporal dependence, existing prediction approaches cannot satisfy certain requirements in multistep (MS) or multitimescale (MTS) applications. In this article, a deep-chain echo state network (DCESN) is proposed to enhance the mapping capability for the MS demand prediction. The DCESN composed of many submodules of echo state network (ESN) belongs to the single-input multi-output (SIMO) model, and neuron states generated by sequential steps are utilized to prevent accumulative error in the recursive chain. Due to the novel learning mechanism of DCESN, numerical coefficients of temporal dependence are presented to explain the short-term and long-term impacts on future energy consumption. Experimental results in four cases indicate that the proposed DCESN has promising performance on MS and MTS prediction, and temporal dependence can be explained in a visible way. Comparative results of DCESN, sliding-window ESN, and long-short term memory (LSTM) demonstrate that the proposed learning mechanism could prevent error accumulation effectively.