User Behavior Prediction in Energy

Consumption in Housing Using Bayesian

Networks

Lamis Hawarah, Stéphane Ploix, and Mireille Jacomino

G-SCOP Laboratory, INP Grenoble, UJF, CNRS,

46, avenue Felix Viallet - 38031 Grenoble, France
{lamis.hawarah,stephane.Ploix,mireille.jacomino}@g-scop.inpg.fr
http://www.g-scop.inpg.fr/

Abstract. This paper deals with the problem of the user behavior pre-
diction in a home automation system. Anticipating the needed energy
for a service is based on the available prediction (like user requests)
which contains the uncertainties. When the future users requests are
not available in a home automation system thanks to programmatic, it
is interesting to predict it to anticipate the energy needed in order to
avoid some problems like peak consumption. A general method to pre-
dict users requests for services in energy consumption is proposed. The
method relies on Bayesian networks to predict and diagnose user’s be-
havior in housing. Some results and perspectives are presented in this
paper.

Keywords: energy consumption, prediction, Data Mining, Bayesian

network.

1 Introduction
A home automation system basically consists of household appliances connected
by an energy network and by a communication network allowing the interac-
tion between appliances. Home and building automation is traditionally used
to increase comfort, to enable remote access to buildings and to increase the
efficiency of buildings. These systems may also aim at determining the best en-
ergy assignment plan and a good compromise between energy production and
energy consumption [5], [6]. In this paper, energy is restricted to the electricity
consumption and production.
Housing with the appliances aims at providing comfort to inhabitants thanks
to services. The services can be decomposed into three kinds: the end-user ser-
vices, the intermediate services and the support services which produce electrical
power to intermediate and end-user services. Generally, when the home automa-
tion system is able to modify the behavior of a service, this service is qualified
as modifiable by the system, for example, modification of the starting time of
a cooking service or interruption of a washing service, etc. A service is qual-
ified as permanent if its energetic consumption/production/storage covers the

L. Rutkowski et al. (Eds.): ICAISC 2010, Part I, LNAI 6113, pp. 372–379, 2010.

c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010
 User Behavior Prediction in Energy Consumption 373

whole time range of the energy assignment plan, otherwise, the service is named
temporary service. In a home automation system, the user is not supposed to
inform the system about his expectations (requested services). When the user’s
demand is not known during a given period, the system must take into account
this uncertainty by anticipating the energy needed for services. This helps the
system to avoid some problems like peak consumption in this period. Therefore,
the behavior of the inhabitant has to be modeled and integrated into the home
automation system.
In this paper, the user’s behavior prediction problem in housing is only deal-
ing with. A general method is proposed to predict the possible inhabitant service
requests for each hour in energy consumption of a 24 hours anticipative time pe-
riod. The idea is based on the use of the Bayesian Network (BN) to predict the
user’s behavior. Bayesian Networks (BNs) [2] are a field of Machine Learning,
capable to represent and manipulate arbitrary probability distributions over ar-
bitrary random variables. They are especially well suited for modeling uncertain
knowledge in expert systems [3]. In this paper, first, related works concerning the
problem of the energy consumption prediction are presented. The next section
shows how a BN is learned and used. The approach to predict the user behavior
in housing is explained. It is based on a real database concerning 100 houses in
France. Finally, some results and perspectives are discussed.

1.1 Related Works

Various studies have been done in the field of impact of the user’s behavior on
the total amount of energy consumption in the households. [9], [10] study the
interaction between the user and the appliances. The appliances are grouped into
four categories of complexity according to their level of automation and number
of settings. For example, the level of automation of the Iron is low and the number
of settings is high. Therefore, the user must need to be in the proximity of the
appliance and be available to monitor the end-uses. They achieved up to 10∼20%
reduction in energy consumption of households by changing the user behavior.
Other studies are interested in modeling and simulation of user activity in control
systems [8]. They integrated the behaviors of individuals and user groups into
building performance simulators to get more realistic results. This approach
models all users and user groups as individual agents with different behaviors.
Different roles and function units such as work places are also modeled. The
main results of this work is that user activities of individuals and groups in
office environments can be modeled on the basis of communicating agents. [7]
studies and analyzes generally the user behavior in home environment.

1.2 Bayesian Networks

A Bayesian network is a graphical model for probabilistic relationships among a

set of variables [4]. BNs model causal relationships. They are represented as di-
rected acyclic graphs, where each node represents a different random variable. A
directed edge from the node X (cause node) to the node Y (effect node) indicates
374 L. Hawarah, S. Ploix, and M. Jacomino

that X has a direct influence on Y. This influence is quantified by the conditional

Probability P (Y |X), stored at node Y. A conditional probability Table (CPT)
is assigned to each node in the network. Such probabilities may be set by an
expert or using a historical database. The nodes in a network can be divided in
two types: evidence node when its value is observed, and query node when its
value is to predict. BNs are based on the conditional independence; each node
is conditionally independent of its non-descendants given its parents. When a
node has no parent, its CPT specifies the prior probability. There are two types
of learning: 1) the structure learning in which the best graph representing the
problem is researched; 2) the parametric learning in which the network structure
is known but the conditional probability will be estimated at each node. Once
the Bayesian Network is constructed, it can be used to compute the probability
distribution for a query variable, given a set of evidence variables. This opera-
tion is called inference. For example, identify the causes by calculating the most
probable cause given some information. Or, predict the effects by calculating the
most frequent value of a node given some observations.

2 Problem Statement

To anticipate the energy needed for a service in a home automation system, the
system must take into account the uncertainty which can be provided by the
user. The user may not inform the system about his energetic plan during a day
or may completely cancel the service which he wanted to use. The objective of
this work is to statistically predict the user energetic service requests at each
hour using a Bayesian network. The nodes are determined with their values and
the relationships between them. However, the Conditional Probability Distribu-
tion at each node is computed using an actual database concerning the energy
consumption in housing.

2.1 Databases

A database is obtained from Residential Monitoring to Decrease Energy Use and

Carbon Emissions in Europe (REMODECE)1 which is a European database on
residential consumption, including Central and Eastern European Countries, as
well as new European Countries (Bulgaria and Romania). This database stores
the characterization of residential electricity consumption by end-user and by
country. The IRISE project has been chosen from REMODECE which deals only
with houses in France. Each database concerns one house; in such a database,
information is recorded every 10 minutes for each appliance in the house and
over one year. This information represents the consumed energy by each service,
its date and its time. An example of this data is given in the figure 12 . Moreover,
it is possible to know the number of people who live in each house. However, this
data is not directly available. Let us notice that appliances are just involved in
1
http://www.isr.uc.pt/~ remodece/
2
In this figure, the Date column represents the date and the time.
 User Behavior Prediction in Energy Consumption 375

Fig. 1. A part of a database representing a house in France

services: they are not central from the inhabitant point of view. Consequently,
they are not explicitly modeled. The presence of the user is important but it is
not predictable at the moment.

3 Using Data to Learn Parameters of the BN

Before processing the data, we must model the problem by characterizing the
user demand. From the data given in the figure 1, a user request concerns one
or more services like cooking in oven, clothe washing, water heating, etc.

3.1 Modeling Data

To anticipate a service in a home automation system, it is interesting to predict:
– When is the service requested? that means the starting hour, month and
week-day;
– How much energy does the service consume?
– What is the duration of the service?
This information characterizes the service request itself and is available in the
database except for the services duration. The information about the inhabitants
characteristics like age, profession and presence in housing are not given.

3.2 Behavior Profile

The aim is to find a profile of the user’s need in energy using only the information
given in the database in order to improve the prediction. Thus, the timestamp
given in the column Date will be dealt with to obtain the month, weekday and
hour separately. A day may be Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
Thursday and Friday. Thus, the first step of this work distinguishes only between
Saturday, Sunday and weekday (WE). The idea is to show if the behavior is
different between the week-end and a weekday without distinguishing between
weekdays. Only the useful information concerning an appliance is extracted from
the database: hourly interval in which the service has been started, duration,
376 L. Hawarah, S. Ploix, and M. Jacomino

Fig. 2. The database after treatment

Fig. 3. Two services starting in the same hour

energy, month, WE, starting number3 . The figure 3 shows that the service started
two times in the same hourly interval. It consumed E1 and went on 10 minutes for
the first starting. For the second, it consumed E2 and went on 30 minutes. Thus,
another database is obtained (figure 2) which represents only one appliance. Each
appliance is modeled into a database.

3.3 Learning the Structure of the BN

The structure of the network is built without using any learning algorithm. To
use a learning algorithm, a database is needed. The available database given in
the figure 1 can not be use for this purpose, because the derived Bayesian network
could only express the relationship between services that is not the interesting
information. The total duration and the total energy for each starting time of
every service is not computed in this database. Moreover, the database given in
the figure 2 is not complete to calculate the independence between the nodes,
because it contains only the useful information about one appliance. A Bayesian
Network for a cooking-oven service is characterized by the following nodes: Hour
node takes 24 values from 0 to 23 which represents the interval in which the
service starts and not the exact time. Month node takes 12 values from January
to December because each house in the database is studied during one year.
WE node takes 3 values {Saturday, Sunday, weekday}. Service-starting node
represents any energetic service and takes two values { yes, no}. This node is
added because a service may be started 3 times in the same hourly interval. The
3
Because the information is given every 10 minutes, an appliance may be started
many times at most 3 times in the same hour interval (figure 3).
 User Behavior Prediction in Energy Consumption 377

Fig. 4. Bayesian Network for cooking-oven service

network is built by taking into account only the first starting. Otherwise, it is
possible to deal with the three starts by replacing the values { yes, no} of the
node service-starting by the values {first-starting, second-starting, third stating,
no}. Both Duration node and Energy node are deterministic. Each node has its
value specified exactly by the values of its parents, with no uncertainty [2]. In
this network, the causal nodes are {hour, WE, month} because they influence the
consumption. Service-starting is the direct effect of the causal nodes; it is also a
causal node for the duration and the energy because the energy and the duration
of a service is obtained after its starting. There are effectively a dependence
between the energy and the time setting {hour, WE, month} because the time
setting influences the consumed energy and the service starting is not enough
only to predict the energy. If the starting hour is not connected with the energy,
changing the starting hour does not have any influence on the consumed energy
and its probability. In reality, this is not true. However, if the starting hour
is connected with the energy, the consumed energy and its probability change
according to the starting hour. For the same reason, the energy and the duration
are connected with the WE and month. The Bayesian network for a cooking-
oven service is given in the figure 4. The Conditional probability Distribution
at each node is calculated from a processed database as given in the figure 2.
A statistical estimation is used to calculate the frequency of the node in the
database (equation 1).
Ni,j,k
P (Xi = xk |pa(Xi ) = xj ) =  (1)
k Ni,j,k

Where Ni,j,k is the number of events in the database for which the variable Xi
takes the value xk and its parents take the values xj .

3.4 Application to the Example of Housings

This section presents the probabilities of starting on some houses from IRISE
database. In this database, there are 27 houses using Electric-oven, the Cooking is
th e service chosen to illustrate the method. The result on the house 2000997, in
which the people number is 5, is presented. The targeted appliances are Electric-
oven and Microwave-oven.
The figure 5 shows the probability that an appliance starts at each hour on
weekdays, Saturday or Sunday (from the top to the bottom) over all the months.
378 L. Hawarah, S. Ploix, and M. Jacomino

Fig. 5. Probability of service starting in the house 2000997

At the left, the appliance is an Electric-oven; at the right, it is a Microwave-oven.

The user behavior in this household on weekdays is not the same on Saturday
or on Sunday. On weekdays, there are two interesting uses: 1) between 11am
and 12am; 2) between 6pm and 7pm. The most frequent value of probability is
0.5. However, the use of the Electric-oven is less frequent on Saturday than on
weekdays but it is more frequent on Sunday evening for some months. On the
other hand, the use of the Microwave-oven is more frequent than the Electric-
oven. The probability reaches the value 1 for some months and at some hours.
For example, the probability that the Microwave starts on weekdays between
6am and 7am is 1. This probability becomes 0.8 between 8 am and 9 am on
Saturday. Other houses are tested on these appliances, but the results are not
given in this paper. Therefore, the user behavior is not identical in all houses.
The Bayesian network in this paper represents only one service in one house. It
is possible to add to this network all the energetic services used in the housing.

4 Conclusion and Perspectives

This paper focuses on the prediction of user behavior in housing and in energy
consumption, because it is a very important problem in a home automation
system. The objective is to construct a model able to predict the user behavior
in housing. The aim is to compute at each hour the probability of starting
of each energetic service in housing. These probabilities are calculated using
databases which consists of the energy consumed by the services in several houses
 User Behavior Prediction in Energy Consumption 379

in France. These probabilities are introduced in a Bayesian Network to be used

easy by a home automation system. This help the system to organize energy
production and consumption and to decide which appliance will be used at each
hour (energy planing). In the future work, a Learning system will be built.
This system contains a set of profiles for each service and is able to choose the
appropriate profile for the user given a service.

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