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conference paper

Transfer Learning for Thermal Building Modeling

Varathan, Anuram
•
Remlinger, Carl  
•
Montazeri, Mina
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August 25, 2025
2025 IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA)
2025 IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications

Accurate building models are essential for developing efficient energy control systems, but creating these models is challenging. Data-driven approaches tackle the time consuming and complex calibration of models by learning building dynamics directly from sensor data. However, the lack of data from newly built buildings hinders the adoption of such methods. To address this data scarcity, transfer learning approaches can adapt a model trained on a source building to a target one with minimal data. This study evaluates different transfer learning strategies-full fine-tuning, partial fine-tuning, and ensemble methods-across three types of building thermal models. Experiments were conducted using data from the UMAR Unit of the NEST building, Dübendorf, Switzerland and the CityLearn environment using data from multiple U.S. cities. Results show that transfer learning enables models to achieve performance close to the Oracle model-trained directly on the target building's data-while significantly reducing data requirements. Notably, partial fine-tuning maintains similar accuracy at a lower computational cost while the ensemble method, which averages fine-tuned models from different sources, can even outperform the Oracle model.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1109/ccta53793.2025.11151506
Author(s)
Varathan, Anuram
Remlinger, Carl  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Montazeri, Mina
Heer, Philipp
Date Issued

2025-08-25

Publisher

IEEE

Published in
2025 IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA)
ISBN of the book

979-8-3315-3908-5

Start page

654

End page

659

Subjects

Building Energy Management

•

Building Modeling

•

Transfer Learning

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
SDSC-GE  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
2025 IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications

CCTA 2025

San Diego, CA, USA

2025-08-25 - 2025-08-27

Available on Infoscience
September 19, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/254191
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