Cross-household Transfer Learning Approach with LSTM-based Demand Forecasting

TL;DR

This paper presents DELTAiF, a transfer learning framework using LSTM models to accurately forecast household hot water demand, significantly reducing training time while maintaining high accuracy, thus enabling scalable hot water production in smart homes.

Contribution

The study introduces DELTAiF, a transfer learning approach that adapts a single model across households, reducing training time by 67% and maintaining high prediction accuracy for hot water demand forecasting.

Findings

Training time reduced by approximately 67%.

Prediction accuracy ranges from 0.874 to 0.991.

Effective especially when source household has regular patterns.

Abstract

With the rapid increase in residential heat pump (HP) installations, optimizing hot water production in households is essential, yet it faces major technical and scalability challenges. Adapting production to actual household needs requires accurate forecasting of hot water demand to ensure comfort and, most importantly, to reduce energy waste. However, the conventional approach of training separate machine learning models for each household becomes computationally expensive at scale, particularly in cloud-connected HP deployments. This study introduces DELTAiF, a transfer learning (TL) based framework that provides scalable and accurate prediction of household hot water consumption. By predicting large hot water usage events, such as showers, DELTAiF enables adaptive yet scalable hot water production at the household level. DELTAiF leverages learned knowledge from a representative household and fine-tunes it across others, eliminating the need to train separate machine learning models for each HP installation. This approach reduces overall training time by approximately 67 percent while maintaining high predictive accuracy values between 0.874 and 0.991, and mean absolute percentage error values between 0.001 and 0.017. The results show that TL is particularly effective when the source household exhibits regular consumption patterns, enabling hot water demand forecasting at scale.