Supporting Decision Making for Building Decarbonization: Developing Surrogate Models for Multi-Criteria Building Retrofitting Analysis

Decarbonizing buildings is crucial in addressing pressing climate change issues. Buildings significantly contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions, and reducing their carbon footprint is essential to achieving sustainable and low-carbon cities. Retrofitting buildings to become more energy efficient constitutes a solution. However, building energy retrofits are complex processes that require a significant number of simulations to investigate the possible options, which limits comprehensive investigations that become infeasible to carry out. Surrogate models can be vital in addressing computational inefficiencies by emulating physics-based models and predicting building performance. However, there is a limited focus on investigating feature engineering and selection methods and their effect on the model’s performance and optimization. Feature selection methods are considered effective with interpretable models such as multi-variate linear regression (MVLR) and multiple adaptive regression splines (MARS) for achieving stable prediction stability. This study proposes a modelling framework to create, optimize, and improve the performance of surrogate predictive models for energy consumption, carbon emissions, and the associated cost of building energy retrofit processes. The investigated feature selection methods are wrapper and embedded methods such as backward-stepwise feature selection (BSFS), recursive feature elimination (RFE), and Elastic Net embedded regularization in order to provide insights into the model’s behavior and optimize the model’s performance. The most accurate surrogate models developed achieved a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 0.2–1.8% compared to the used test data. In addition, when calculated for a million samples, all developed surrogate models reduced the computational time by one-thousand-fold compared to physics-based models. The study’s findings pave the way towards low-computational accurate models that can comprehensively predict building performance in near real-time, ultimately leading to identifying decarbonization measures at scale.