Prediction of Indoor Air Temperature Using Weather Data and Simple Building Descriptors

Non-optimal air temperatures can have serious consequences for human health and productivity. As the climate changes, heatwaves and cold streaks have become more frequent and intense. The ClimApp project aims to develop a smartphone App that provides individualised advice to cope with thermal stress outdoors and indoors. This paper presents a method to predict indoor air temperature to evaluate thermal indoor environments. Two types of input data were used to set up a predictive model: weather data obtained from online weather services and general building attributes to be provided by App users. The method provides discrete predictions of temperature through a decision tree classification algorithm. The data used to train and test the algorithm was obtained from field measurements in seven Danish households and from building simulations considering three different climate regions, ranging from temperate to hot and humid. The results show that the method had an accuracy of 92% (F1-score) when predicting temperatures under previously known conditions (e.g., same household, occupants and climate). However, the performance decreased to 30% under different climate conditions. The approach had the highest performance when predicting the most commonly observed indoor temperatures. The findings suggest that it is possible to develop a straightforward and fairly accurate method for indoor temperature estimation grounded on weather data and simple building attributes.