A Large-scale Study on Predicting and Contextualizing Building Energy Usage
J. Zico Kolter

Joseph Ferreira Jr.

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139

Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139

Abstract
In this paper we present a data-driven approach to modeling end user energy consumption in residential andcommercial buildings. Our model is based upon a data
set of monthly electricity and gas bills, collected bya utility over the course of several years, for approximately 6,500 buildings in Cambridge, MA. In addition,
we use publicly available tax assessor records and geographical survey information to determine corresponding features for the buildings. Using both parametricand non-parametric learning methods, we learn models that predict distributions over energy usage based
upon these features, and use these models to develop
two end-user systems. For utilities or authorized institutions (those who may obtain access to the full data)
we provide a system that visualizes energy consumption for each building in the city; this allows companies to quickly identify outliers (buildings which use
much more energy than expected even after conditioning on the relevant predictors), for instance allowing
them to target homes for potential retrofits or tiered pricing schemes. For other end users, we provide an interface for entering their own electricity and gas usage,
along with basic information about their home, to determine how their consumption compares to that of similar buildings as predicted by our model. Merely allowing users to contextualize their consumption in this way,
relating it to the consumption in similar buildings, canitself produce behavior changes to significantly reduce
consumption.

Introduction
In the effort to build a sustainable society, energy issues playa crucial role. Humans consume an average of more than 16
terrawatts of power and growing, 86% of which comes from(unsustainable) fossil fuels (Multiple 2009). In the UnitedStates, 41% of all energy is consumed in residential andcommercial buildings, mainly in the forms of electricity andnatural gas. Reducing these consumptions in particular willplay a large role in reducing our overall energy dependence.
As a whole, however, end users receive relatively little
information about their energy usage. Most of the feedback we receive about our energy consumption comes via
Copyright c 2011, Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.

monthly electricity and gas bills, which provide little information or context to our usage other than a dollar amount.
Crucially, energy bills provide no mechanism to determine
things such as how a building’s consumption compares tosimilar buildings, whether retrofits or upgraded appliances
are financially reasonable, what portion of the consumption is simply due to location (cold locations will inevitably
require more heating, for example) versus personal behavior, etc. Moreover, simply providing people with feedback
about their energy use can itself produce behavior changes
that significantly reduce energy consumption (Darby 2006;
Neenan and Robinson 2009). Recent research has specifically highlighted the value of normative energy feedback,showing users how their usage relates to that of their peers
and neighbors (Cialdini and Schultz 2004; Allcott 2010).
In this paper, we present a study of energy consumption
in a large number of buildings in Cambridge, Massachusetts,and develop models than can begin to answer such questions. We use a data set consisting of monthly electrical andgas bills, collected by a utility, for approximately 6,500 separate buildings in the city. We integrate this usage information with publicly available tax assessor and geographicalsurvey information to correlate energy usage with features
such as living area, building value, building type, etc,. We
perform a preliminary analysis of the data set, focusing on
the value of using logarithmic scaling for energy usage, andwe use feature selection methods to determine the most relevant features for predicting consumption. We then apply
both parametric and non-parametric learning algorithms topredict distributions over building consumption. Finally, we
use these models to develop EnergyView, a system that allows both utilities (at a city-wide scale) and end users (at asingle building scale) to view and compare their energy usage to that of similar buildings as predicted by the models.

Related Work
This paper builds upon a number of works, both from theenergy sector and the statistics and machine learning communities. Since this is primarily and application and analysis
paper, we mainly use existing algorithmic approaches, butwith a focus on recently developed methods for regression
under non-Gaussian likelihoods (Kotz and Nadarajah 2004;
Vanhatalo, Jylanki, and Vehtari 2009).
From the energy community, our work builds most di-Data Collection and Analysis
The primary data set we build our model upon is a collection of monthly electricity and gas bills, collected over several years from buildings in Cambridge, MA, and obtained
from NStar, the electricity and gas utility in Cambridge. The
data consists of electricity and gas account numbers, theircorresponding street addresses, and monthly electricity andgas meter readings for each account over some period oftime, typically two to three years. Electricity usage is given
in kilowatt-hours per month, while gas usage is given intherms per month. To convert these to equivalent units, we
use the conversion factor (1/3)29.3 therms/kwh, where 29.3
is the standard conversion rate, and 2/3 represents the average conversion loss for electricity generation in the UnitedStates; this also corresponds to the relative pricing of gas andelectricity, an average of $1.05/therm and $0.11/kwh respectively (Multiple 2009). The primary goal of our algorithms
will be to predict this total usage as a function of building
features (though we also apply the same techniques to estimating monthly electricity and gas usage separately in orderto provide more detailed feedback).
In addition to the energy data, we use publicly available
tax assessor records1 and a Geographic Information System (GIS) database2 compiled by the city. The tax asses1
Tax assessor records for Cambridge are available via
a web interface at http://www2.cambridgema.gov/
fiscalaffairs/PropertySearch.cfm. We know of nosource where the database can be downloaded directly, and instead
had to use an automated tool to parse and import the records via
this interface.
2
GIS databases for Cambridge can be ordered at

300

250

200
Count

rectly upon the studies, mentioned above, that highlight theimportance of normative feedback for improving energy efficiency (Cialdini and Schultz 2004; Allcott 2010). Indeed,
we are aware of several companies that work in this area, but
as they do not share the details of their models or data, it isdifficult to know what methods they employ.
Several academic studies exist that examine individual
home residential energy usage at a high resolution, (e.g.,(Berges et al. 2009)), but this work is roughly orthogonal tothis paper, as we here consider much lower resolution data,
but for many more houses. Likewise, there exist several studies on building energy consumption at a highly aggregate
level (Berry 2005), but again these differ from this work as
we consider a data set obtained directly from a large numberof individual buildings.
Thus, in relation to this past work, this paper makes several contributions. We analyze a large-scale real-world energy usage data set, illustrate several interesting characteristics of the data, use recent machine learning techniques todevelop predictive models, and present a public end-user interface for obtaining contextual information about ones own
energy use. To the best of our knowledge, this represents oneof the largest-scale, publicly-available studies of its kind,conducted on real data, and the EnergyView tool represents
one of the first tools of its kind where the algorithms behind
its predictions are fully described.

150

100

50

0 3
10

4

5

10

10

6

10

Kwh / Year

Figure 1: A histogram of total energy consumption perbuilding, for the 6,499 buildings considered. Note the logarithmic scale on the x axis.
sor records contain detailed features about every registeredproperty and building in Cambridge, listing for each address features such as the value of the building, the property
class (condominium, single family home, retail store, etc),
the square footage, the year a building was built, and othersimilar features. The GIS database consists of polygonal outlines for parcels and buildings in the city, plus estimated roof
heights for buildings (obtained via an aerial lidar scan). We
aggregate features at the whole building level, so that, forexample, multiple units at a given street address are aggregated into one building; this is a necessity since the utility
data does not include unit numbers, but only a street number
and street name. After correlating addresses between the energy usage, tax assessor, and GIS databases, and removing
any entries for which there are less than a year of full gas andelectricity readings, there are a total of 6,499 unique buildings that we include in our data set. This represents slightly
more than half of the 12,792 unique addresses in the Cambridge tax assessor records (the main reason for omitting abuilding is that one or more of the correspond energy accounts don’t span a full uninterrupted year in the utility data
we have access to).

Logarithmic Energy Scaling
A preliminary analysis of the data illustrates several interesting features, which we build upon to develop models inthe subsequent section. Figure 1 shows a histogram of totalenergy consumption per year for the different buildings inour data set. The data appears roughly Gaussian (althoughslightly skewed), but the important fact here is that the xaxis is logarithmic, implying that total energy consumption
roughly follows a log-normal distribution. This means thatenergy consumption varies multiplicatively between different houses: a house in the 80th percentile of energy consumption uses about 3 times as much energy as a house in
the 20th percentile. Further, even the log-normal distribution in fact underestimates the spread of the data; the data is
heavy-tailed, such that a log Student-t distribution (Cassidy,
http://www.cambridgema.gov/gis.aspx.

Feature

6

Energy Consumption (Kwh / Year)

10

5

10

4

10

3

10
500

1,000

2,000
5,000
10,000
Building Living Area (sq ft)

20,00050,000Figure 2: A plot of building square footage versus total
yearly energy consumption, both in logarithmic scales. The
dotted line shows the least-squares fit.
Hamp, and Ouyed 2010) fits the energy consumption better,as we will show quantitatively in the next section.
Approximately log-normal distributions of energy usage
may initially seem rather surprising, but these are actually quite reasonable given other phenomena in economics
and social science. In particular, many observed phenomena
naturally follow roughly log-normal distributions (Limpert,
Stahel, and Abbt 2001), including factors that would be expected to influence energy consumption, such as income,property sizes, and (in our own data set) building square
footage. Furthermore, power-law behaviors, defined as a linear relationships between the logarithms of input and output
variables (Newman 2005), are ubiquitous in many empirical domains, including domains related to city consumption and scaling (Kuhnert, Helbing, and West 2006). Since
the Gaussian and multivariate T distributions are preserved
by linear transformations (Kotz and Nadarajah 2004) (i.e.,a linear function of a multivariate Gaussian or multivariate
T distribution will also be Gaussian or multivariate T), lognormal or log-T input variables, together with a power-law
relationship, would imply the same distribution for the output. Figure 2 illustrates this type of relationship for our dataset, plotting building living area as square footage against
total energy consumption on a log-log scale. While there isnaturally a great deal of noise, there is also a fairly clear
linear relationship, indicating an intuitive power-law relationship between square footage and energy consumption.
While the relationships are more difficult to display when
additional variates are introduced, the chief goal of the next
section will be to exploit these types of relationships to derive predictive models of energy consumption based upon
known features.

Data Features and Feature Selection
Finally, before discussing the modeling methods we use forthis data, we discuss the actual features used to predict energy consumption, as well as feature selection proceduresthat identify the most relevant features for this task. We extract a total of 35 features from the tax assessor and GIS dataset, all of which are shown in Table 1. Many of the features

Building Value
Num Electric Meters
Property Class
Living Area
Num Gas Meters
Heat Fuel
Building StyleHeat TypeCentral AC
Overall Grade
Roof Material
Exterior Wall Type
Occupancy Type
Laplacian Eigenvectors
GIS Parcel Area
Total Rooms
Residential Exemption
Fireplaces
Overall Condition
Full Baths
Roof Type
Assessed ValueGIS Parcel PerimeterLand Area
Land Value
Half Baths
Garage Parking
Year Built
GIS Building Perimeter
GIS Building Area
GIS Building Volume
Num Stories
Open Parking
Covered Parking
Residential/Commercial% RMSE
Reduction
24.721 %13.438 %12.729 %2.760 %
2.517 %
2.241 %
1.432 %
0.826 %
0.749 %
-0.045 %0.105 %
-0.300 %-0.656 %0.138 %
0.164 %
0.074 %
0.037 %
0.014 %
-0.068 %0.000 %
-0.024 %-0.010 %0.001 %
-0.007 %-0.202 %-0.023 %-0.039 %-0.013 %-0.014 %0.033 %
0.016 %
-0.041 %-0.011 %-0.013 %-0.553 %Individual
Correlation
0.659
0.647
0.633
0.611
0.626
0.480
0.632
0.431
0.558
0.346
0.595
0.597
0.623
0.180
0.381
0.049
0.207
0.092
0.234
0.101
0.557
0.615
0.371
0.352
0.377
0.022
0.229
0.095
0.104
0.143
0.112
0.064
0.069
0.071
0.272

Table 1: All the building features extracted from the tax assessor and GIS data, ranked in the order that they are selected in greedy forward feature selection. The first nine features (above the line) decrease cross-validation RMSE (second column), to a statistically significant degree (p < 0.01
in a pairwise t-test). Also shown is the correlation coefficient
between total energy and the feature in isolation.

are real-valued, in which case we include their logarithm(owing to the discussion above) directly in the final feature
vector. For discrete features, we use a standard binary encoding of the feature, i.e., for a k-valued discrete value we
add the representation
φ(xi ) ∈ {0, 1}k = (1{xi = 1}, . . . , 1{xi = k})(1)

to the feature vector, where all the entries are zero if a discrete value is previously unseen or if the feature value is
unknown. All the features listed in Table 1 are extracted
directly from the GIS or tax assessor database with the
exception of the “Laplacian Eigenvectors” feature, whichuses a standard spectral clustering procedure (Chung 1997).
Briefly, we construct this feature by building a (symmetric)
k-nn graph on the 2D building locations, then looking at
the principle eigenvectors (here corresponding to the lowest
eigenvalues) of the discrete normalized Laplacian operator
on this graph, defined as
L = I − D−1/2 AD−1/2(2)

where D is a diagonal matrix of node degrees in the graphand A is an adjacency matrix. These features provide an optimal orthogonal basis for reconstructing smooth functions
on the graph’s manifold, and thus in our setting correspondto smoothly spatially varying functions (in terms of the arrangement of the building locations).
Since we are in a data-rich setting, where we have significantly more features than examples, it is possible to simply
pass all these features to our learning algorithms; even thealgorithms we consider, which can in theory be sensitive toirrelevant features, do not perform significantly worse whenprovided with all the features. Nonetheless, for the sake ofmodel simplicity and intuition, it is very useful to determine
which of the features we extract are most useful for predicting energy consumption. To this end, we employ a simple
greedy forward feature selection procedure that sequentiallyadds features based on how much they decrease training root
mean squared error (RMSE) of a linear regression predictor.
Table 1 shows a list of the features in the order they are selected by the greedy procedure. The table also shows how
much adding the feature decreases the RMSE as measured
by cross validation; thus, while adding a feature by definition
will always decrease the training RMSE to some extent, only
the first 9 features decrease the RMSE as measured via crossvalidation to a statistically significant degree (p < 0.01 in
a pairwise t-test). These also correspond to features that wewould expect to have a large impact on energy consumption:building value; square footage; number of electric/gas accounts (recall that since we are computing energy usage ona per-building basis, the number of electric and gas accounts
serve as a rough proxy for the number of separate units);
building class (a discrete feature that designates the building
as a condominium, single family home, multi-family home,retail store, office building, etc); heat fuel (oil, gas, or electric); heat type (forced air, hot water, electric radiant, etc),
and whether or not the house has central AC.
Equally interesting are the features that do not lead to asignificant decrease in RMSE. For example, including the
eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian does not significantly
improve performance. This suggests that spatially varying
attributes are not especially prevalent in this data set: while
there is spatial correlation in total energy consumption, once
we regress on other features that also are spatially correlated(such as building value), there is little added benefit to including purely spatial features. To illustrate this, we also
include in Table 1 the correlation coefficient between eachof the different features and the total energy consumption,
which captures how correlated each feature is with the totalenergy independent of any other features. In cases where thiscorrelation is high, yet the feature is ranked low in Table 1,then the feature is also highly correlated with the previously

selected features, such that adding the feature to a linear regression model gives little added benefit.
Although the forward selection procedure that we use iswell-known to be overly greedy in certain cases (Tibshirani
1996) (this had lead to a variety of alternative procedures
such as LASSO-based feature selection (Efron et al. 2004)),
the approach is often very effective both in practice and intheory (Zhang 2009). In previous experiments we found virtually no difference in the features selected when considering more complex procedures such as the LASSO. Additionally, since we are performing feature selection based onlinear regression, there may be some concern of throwing
out features that are potentially of interest to the non-linear
regression algorithms we consider later. However, this has
not been the case in the experiments we have considered,and we will discuss this further in the next section.

Modeling and Evaluation
In this section we present learning methods for predicting
energy usage given known features of a building. As we
don’t expect to predict the energy usage exactly (certainly
energy consumption depends on many variables that are notknown, including end-user preferences), and since, as we
will discuss more in the section, we are concerned with providing users with information about where they lie in the
distribution of energy consumption, our focus is on probabilistic methods that return a distribution over possible energy consumption levels. Formally, our predictors will all
have the formy = f (x) + ǫ(3)m
where y ∈ R denotes the predicted energy usage (or rather,based on the discussion above, the logarithm of the predictedenergy usage), x ∈ Rn denotes a vector of inputs describing known features of the house (that we delineate below),and ǫ denotes a (possibly input dependent) zero-mean error
term. Although we focus in this section on real-valued regression (predicting just the total energy consumption), weapply these same methods to multivariate predictions, for instance to predict the energy consumption in each month asshown later in the paper. We focus on two well-known probabilistic regression techniques: linear models and Gaussian
process regression. However, given the above discussion regarding the log T distribution fitting the data better than log
normal distributions, we focus also upon more recent work
using non-Gaussian likelihoods.

Linear Regression
In the linear regression case,f (x) = θT x

(4)for parameters θ ∈ Rn , and the error term is given by some
input-independent distribution p(ǫ), often referred to as thelikelihood function. Based upon the discussion in the previous section, we consider the standard normal error term
(leading to ordinary least squares), a Student-t distributed
error term, and a Laplace distributed error term (anotherheavy-tailed distribution commonly used in robust regression). The densities and notation for the normal, Laplace,and T distribution are given respectively byǫ21
exp − 2p(ǫ ; σ) = √
2σ
2πσ


1
|ǫ|
p(ǫ ; σ) =
exp −
(5)
2σ
σ

 −ν+12
Γ((ν + 1)/2)
ǫ2√
p(ǫ ; σ, ν) =1+
νσ 2Γν/2 2πσ
where σ is a scale parameter and ν is a degree of freedom parameter for the T distribution. Given a data set {xi , yi }N
i=1 ,we can compute maximum likelihood estimates of θ and therelevant distribution parameters for each of these models.
Defining the design matrices


 T 
y1
x1




(6)
X ≡  ...  , y ≡  ... T
yN
xN
then for the normal likelihood the ML estimates areθ̂ = (XT X)−1 XT y
(7)
1
σ̂ 2 = (y − Xθ̂)T (y − Xθ̂).
n
For the Laplace likelihoodθ̂ = arg min ky − Xθk1
θ

(8)

1
ky − Xθ̂k1nwhere k · k1 denote the ℓ1 norm (the sum of the absolutevalues of a vector), which makes the optimization over θ aconvex optimization problem (solved, for example, via linear programming (Boyd and Vandenberghe 2004)). For the
T distribution there is no closed form estimate for the parameters, but they can be obtained via the EM algorithm, whichamounts to iterating the following updates until convergence1
si ← 2 (yi − θ̂T xi )T (yi − θ̂T xi )σ̂ν̂ + 1wi ←ν̂ + siσ̂ =θ̂ ← (XT diag(w)X)−1 XT diag(w)y1
σ̂ 2 ← T (y − Xθ̂)T diag(w)(y − Xθ̂)
1 w
NX
ν̂ ← arg minlog p(y − θ̂T xi ; 0, σ̂, ν)
ν

(9)

i=1

where probability in the optimization over ν is the densityof the T distribution, and this step is performed via numerical optimization.3 Because the log likelihood is not convex
with respect to the parameters, there is no guarantee that thisprocedure will find the global optimum but in practice if we
initialize θ̂ and σ̂ 2 to be, for example, the least squares estimates, then this procedure is quite robust.
3

Regression with a T distribution is not often done in this manner (for example, the presentation in (Kotz and Nadarajah 2004)
does not describe this procedure), but this a straightforward extension of ML estimation for the T distribution to the regression
setting, and seems to be well known.

Gaussian Process Regression
Gaussian process (GP) regression (Rasmussen and Williams
2006) provides a non-parametric regression method, and allows for much richer representations than in linear regression. In GP regression, the underlying regression function
f is modeled as a Gaussian process, a stochastic process
where the distribution of f (x1 ), f (x2 ), . . . for any set of inputs x1 , x2 , . . . is jointly Gaussian with some mean (which
we will assume to be zero), and covariances
Cov(f (xi ), f (xj )) = K(xi , xj )

(10)
n

n

for some positive definite kernel function K : R ×R → R.
Overloading notation slightly, we write this as
f |X ∼ N (0, K(X, X))

(11)
N ×N

and where in the following we will simply use K ∈ R
to denote K(X, X) (the kernel matrix formed between all
the training examples). As before, we assume that yi =f (xi ) + ǫ, where ǫ is again a zero-mean error term with oneof the three distributions described above. When ǫ is Gaussian with variance σǫ2 , the distribution p(f (x′ )|X, y, x′ ) (thedistribution value of f (x′ ) for some new input x′ ) is also
Gaussian, and can be computed in closed formf (x′ ) ∼ N K(x′ , X)(K + σǫ2 I)−1 y,K(x′ , x′ ) − K(x′ , X)(K + σǫ2 I)−1 K(X, x′ ) .
(12)

When ǫ is Laplace or T distributed, there is no longer aclosed form expression for the distribution over f (x′ ), andwe must resort to approximate methods such as Expectation Propagation, Variational Bayes, or the Laplace approximation (Rasmussen and Williams 2006; Vanhatalo, Jylanki,
and Vehtari 2009). A description of these methods is beyond
the scope of this paper, but several freely available software
packages exist that implement such approximate methods
for GP regression with non-Gaussian likelihood.4
For our task we use the squared exponential kernel function, with independent length scales, given by!
nX(xi − x′i )2′2
K(x, x ) = s exp
(13)
2ℓ2i
i=1

where the the magnitude s ∈ R+ and length scales ℓi ∈R+ are free parameters. As is common practice, we estimate
these parameters by maximizing the marginal likelihood of
the training data, given byZ
p(y|X) = p(y|f , X)p(f |X)df .
(14)

As before, when the likelihood is Gaussian this term (and its
derivatives with respect to the free parameters) can be computed analytically. When the likelihood is not Gaussian, approximations are again needed, but again the software packages mentioned above provide methods for doing so.
4
In this work we use the GPML package (Rasmuseen and Hickish 2011) for the Gaussian and Laplace likelihood GP regression,and the GPstuff package (Vanahtalo et al. 2011) for the T likelihood
GP regression.

Method
Output only, Normal likelihood
Output only, Laplace likelihood
Output only, T likelihood
Linear regression, Normal likelihood
Linear regression, Laplace likelihood
Linear regression, T likelihood
GP regression, Normal likelihood
GP regression, Laplace likelihood
GP regression, T likelihood
GP regression, all features
Linear regression, no log
GP regression, no log

Log Likelihood-1.484 (-1.482)-1.413 (-1.412)-1.399 (-1.399)-0.813 (-0.788)-0.710 (-0.685)-0.695 (-0.674)-0.782 (-0.747)-0.660 (-0.620)-0.629 (-0.557)-0.786 (-0.710)-15.240 (-14.962)-15.874 (-90.589)

RMSE
1.066 (1.065)
1.079 (1.079)
1.074 (1.074)
0.545 (0.532)
0.549 (0.537)
0.547 (0.536)
0.531 (0.503)
0.535 (0.495)
0.543 (0.502)
0.533 (0.485)
1.738 (1.732)
2.775 (0.624)

No Log RMSE (×105 )11.106 (11.105)
11.110 (11.110)
11.109 (11.109)
9.581 (9.231)
9.422 (9.397)
9.488 (9.402)
9.212 (8.016)
9.704 (7.609)
9.746 (5.928)
9.243 (6.313)
9.260 (7.566)
11.240 (2.889)

Table 2: Cross validation performance (and training set performance in parenthesis) of the different algorithms evaluated bythree metrics: log likelihood of the data, root mean squared error (RMSE), and RMSE on the data before logarithmic scaling.
Items in bold indicate the best performing method, statistically significant in a pairwise t-test with p < 0.01.

Experimental Setup and Results
We evaluated the performance of the algorithms describedabove using 5 fold cross validation: we divided the 6,499
data points randomly into 5 approximately equal-sizedgroups, trained the above regression methods on the unionof 4 of these groups, then tested on the held out data; werepeated this for each of the 5 groups, and report the average error and log likelihood over all the held-out examples.
To report training errors, we trained and tested on the entire data set. For the GP models, since hyperparameter optimization is quite computationally intensive, we optimized
these parameters by maximizing marginal likelihood only
on a random subset of 700 of the training examples for eachcross validation fold; once we learned these hyperparameters, however, we used the entire training set to predict theheld-out data.
Table 2 shows the performance of the different algorithms
on this data set. We evaluated the algorithms via three metrics: log likelihood of the data, root mean squared error(RMSE) on the logarithmically scaled outputs, and RMSE
on the original energy consumptions (without logarithmic
scaling, noted in Table 2 by “No-Log”). For comparison, we
also present “Output only” results, which simply involve fitting the T, Laplacian, and normal distributions directly tothe log of the energy data (without any regressors). Summarizing the results briefly, the best-performing model weobtain is able to explain about 75% of the variance (in thelogarithmic scale) using the features described above. Thisnaturally leaves a great deal of variance unexplained, but ofcourse this is expected, since we must imagine that some elements of the energy usage are simply behaviorally basedand cannot be predicted in the normal sense; indeed, theseare precisely the situations where we want to present suchinformation to the user.
In greater detail, as seen in the table, the GP methods
obtain the best overall performance, with the normal likelihood performing best as measured by the RMSE and the
T likelihood performing best in terms of the log likelihood.
However, while the GP methods do perform better than thesimple linear regression models, we argue that the simple

linear models are in some respects preferable for this domain. The linear regression methods all obtain RMSE that is
only marginally worse than the GP methods, they allow for
simple descriptions of energy usage in terms of power-law
relationship, and they provide much more succinct, computationally efficient, and interpretable models. We also lookat alternative regression approaches, such as including all
the extracted features for the non-linear GP, or using thedata without logarithmic scaling to make predictions. In bothcases, the resulting approaches perform no better, and in thecase of omitting the log transformation, the resulting methods can perform much worse, both in terms of the log-based
RMSE and the RMSE in the original scale (log likelihoodterms are not directly comparable, as the data is not on thesame scale before the log transformation).

EnergyView
Based upon the models from the previous section, we havedeveloped an end-user application, EnergyView, that lets
companies or individuals view and compare their energy
usage, based upon how their true usage compares to themodel’s predictions. The system consists of two parts: forthe utilities or authorized organizations (anyone who may
obtain access to the individual energy records), we have developed a graphical interface that layers energy consumption over a map of the area. The interface allows users toquickly determine outliers according to the model: buildingthat use significantly more (or less, though presumably little
needs to be done in this case) energy than predicted by themodel (i.e., even accounting for all the observed features ofthe building). Thus, these are prime candidates for buildings
where energy usage could be reduced by behavior changes,
retrofits, etc. Presenting this information to a community organization aimed at energy efficiency, for example, could
greatly help such groups decide where to focus resources.
A (simulated) screenshot of this system is shown in Figure
3. Due to privacy considerations, such a system is unlikely
to become publicly available (though users could opt in toallow public display of their information), but could still behighly valuable for authorized groups.

Figure 3: Example image of the city-level EnergyView tool.
While the image here is indicative of how the interface
looks, for privacy reasons the color codes and energy consumption in this picture are generated via random sampling,
and do not correspond to the actual building consumptions
in Cambridge.
The second component of the EnergyView system is an
end-user tool that lets an owner enter the relevant information about their own home or building, plus gas and electrical consumption, in order to find where they lie in relation to the model’s prediction (we refer to this process
as contextualizing energy usage, as it puts it in the context of similar homes). Because such a tool does not disclose identifying information, it can be released publicly
and used by building owners or efficiency groups alike. A
screenshot of the resulting analysis page is shown in Figure
4, showing a building’s consumption versus expected consumption for each month and displaying where the building lies in the overall distribution. A web version of thetool is available http://people.csail.mit.edu/
kolter/energyview. Although, because our approach
is fully data-driving, the validity of the model is specific to
the general area of Cambridge, MA, the techniques are quite
general, and the same system could be set up for any location
given access to similar data.

Conclusion
In this paper we presented a study and analysis of building
energy consumption in a large urban environment. To thebest of our knowledge, this represents one of the largest academic studies of individual home and building energy consumption using real data for a single city. We have analyzed
the distributions of this data, and used these insights to learn
models that can predict expected energy usage given features of the home, and which are able to explain roughly
75% of the observed variance in energy consumption according to our logarithmic scaling of the data. Finally, we describe and release EnergyView, a tool that uses these models
to visualize both city-level information, and building-level

Figure 4: Image of the home-level EnergyView analysis.
information, allowing end-users to see where their home lies
within the expected distribution.
Looking forward, there are numerous possible directions
for future work. We are continuing to look for additionalsources of data that could be incorporated into the model,such as home survey data or image data. Despite the fact thatspatial features did not help the predictions in our current
data set, location data seems still to be a promising sourceof information, and there is a need for algorithms or featuresthat can better capture such relationships. We are working
to expand the EnergyView application to allow for opt-in
data sharing and incorporation of entered data into the internal models. More broadly speaking, the models and EnergyView tool we present here represents just one facet of thebuilding energy problem; equally important is how we use
these models to produce actionable information to the propergroups that can actually lead to energy savings. Understanding how to best achieve these savings using the model’s
predictions and determining how the predictions correlatewith changeable behaviors in a community, remains a crucial question for further work.

Acknowledgements
We thank Harvey Michaels for his assistance in obtaining
the NStar data. J. Zico Kolter is supported by an NSF Computing Innovation Fellowship.

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