Paper ID: 2203.05242

Conditional Synthetic Data Generation for Personal Thermal Comfort Models

Hari Prasanna Das, Costas J. Spanos

Personal thermal comfort models aim to predict an individual's thermal comfort response, instead of the average response of a large group. Recently, machine learning algorithms have proven to be having enormous potential as a candidate for personal thermal comfort models. But, often within the normal settings of a building, personal thermal comfort data obtained via experiments are heavily class-imbalanced. There are a disproportionately high number of data samples for the "Prefer No Change" class, as compared with the "Prefer Warmer" and "Prefer Cooler" classes. Machine learning algorithms trained on such class-imbalanced data perform sub-optimally when deployed in the real world. To develop robust machine learning-based applications using the above class-imbalanced data, as well as for privacy-preserving data sharing, we propose to implement a state-of-the-art conditional synthetic data generator to generate synthetic data corresponding to the low-frequency classes. Via experiments, we show that the synthetic data generated has a distribution that mimics the real data distribution. The proposed method can be extended for use by other smart building datasets/use-cases.

Submitted: Mar 10, 2022