A Comparative Study of Artificial Intelligence Models for Predicting Interior Illuminance

Thanks to the recent advances in computer technology, many building energy performance simulation tools have been developed in the current market. Designers and architects are interested in working on this topic in the early phases of the project. However, effective energy solutions are computationally expensive. As a result, having a comprehensive insight into the project conditions in the early phases of the work is a vital issue. The present study aimed to propose an artificial intelligence (Al) model to generate a reasonably accurate estimate in a short time. To this end, four machine learning models and one artificial neural network (ANN) are selected and their results are compared to assess their capabilities in energy performance estimation. This study investigates the influence of the exterior louver design on the interior energy performance of a structure. A specific dataset is generated and tested on four powerful regression models (i.e., polynomial Linear Regression, Random Forests (RF), Decision Tree (DT), and Support Vector Regression (SVR)) and one Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Finally, a comparative analysis is presented. The findings of this research support the use of machine learning tools and ANNs as a convenient and accurate strategy for predicting building parameters.