Outlier Detection in Buildings’ Power Consumption Data Using Forecast Error

Buildings play a central role in energy transition, as they were responsible for 67.8% of the total consumption of electricity in France in 2017. Because of that, detecting anomalies (outliers) is crucial in order to identify both potential opportunities to reduce energy consumption and malfunctioning of the metering system. This work aims to compare the performance of several outlier detection methods, such as classical statistical methods (as boxplots) applied to the actual measurements and to the difference between the measurements and their predictions, in the task of detecting outliers in the power consumption data of a tertiary building located in France. The results show that the combination of a regression method, such as random forest, and the adjusted boxplot outlier detection method have promising potential in detecting this type of data quality problem in electricity consumption.