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April 17, 2026Applied Sciences2 citationsOpen Access

Explainable Smart-Building Energy Consumption Forecasting and Anomaly Diagnosis Framework Based on Multi-Head Transformer and Dual-Stream Detection

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YCYuanyu CaiDLDan LiaoBLBin Liu

Key Points

  • The aim is to develop an integrated framework for energy load forecasting and reliable anomaly diagnosis in smart buildings.
  • Developed a Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model for hourly energy demand forecasting.
  • Implemented a dual-scale strategy for anomaly diagnosis, focusing on both short-term and long-term anomalies.
  • Utilized adaptive thresholds to detect short-term anomalies from forecasting residuals.
  • Compared current residual patterns with historical baselines for long-term anomaly detection.
  • Provided SHAP-based explanations for interpreting predictions and detected anomalies.
  • Achieved a mean absolute percentage error of approximately 3% in forecasting performance.
  • Demonstrated superior performance against conventional baselines and recent Transformer-based models.
  • Effectively distinguished various types of anomalies: point, pattern, and composite.

Abstract

Fine-grained energy management in smart-campus buildings requires accurate load forecasting together with reliable and interpretable anomaly diagnosis. This study presents an integrated forecasting–diagnosis framework for building energy systems. Hourly energy demand is modeled using a Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence architecture, in which a domain-aware attention mechanism is introduced to separately represent historical consumption dynamics, environmental influences, and temporal regularities commonly observed in building energy use. Anomaly diagnosis is conducted through a dual-scale strategy that supports both the timely detection of abrupt abnormal events and the identification of gradual performance degradation. Short-term anomalies are detected from forecasting residuals using adaptive thresholds, while long-term anomalies are identified by comparing current residual patterns with same-season historical baselines and validating multi-window trends over a 48 h horizon. The two detection streams are jointly used to distinguish point, pattern, and composite anomalies. To support practical operation and maintenance, SHAP-based explanations are provided to interpret both energy predictions and detected anomalies. Case studies on two educational buildings from the Building Data Genome Project 2 demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves the best overall forecasting performance against both conventional baselines and stronger recent Transformer-based models, with mean absolute percentage errors of approximately 3%. The results indicate that the proposed framework provides a practical solution for data-driven energy monitoring and decision support in smart buildings.

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Cite This Study

Cai et al. (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/69e1d0165cdc762e9d8591efhttps://doi.org/10.3390/app16083836
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