Data mining cubes for buildings, a generic framework for multidimensional analytics of building performance data
Julien Leprince, Clayton Carl Miller, Wim Zeiler · Energy and Buildings · 2021
Over the last decade, collecting massive volumes of data has been made all the more accessible, pushing the building sector to embrace data mining as a powerful tool for harvesting the potential of big data analytics. However repetitive challenges still persist emerging from the need for a common analytical frame, effective application- and insight-driven targeted data selection, as well as benchmarked-supported claims. This study addresses these concerns by putting forward a generic stepwise multidimensional data mining framework tailored to building data, leveraging the dimensional-structures of data cubes. Using the open Building Data Genome Project 2 set, composed of 3053 energy meters from 1636 buildings, we provide an online, open access, implementation illustration of our method applied to automated pattern identification. We define a 3-dimensional building cube echoing typical analytical frames of interest, namely, bottom-up, top-down and temporal drill-in approaches. Our results highlight the importance of application and insight driven mining for effective dimensional-frame targeting. Impactful visualizations were developed allowing practical human inspection, paving the path towards more interpretable analytics.