Johnny Hu Multimodal residential energy prediction
A building's efficiency is written in three places at once —
its measurements, its description, and where it stands.
The question was how to read them together.
The question
An EPC assessment carries tabular building features,
a written description, and a location.
Most models take the first and discard the rest.
This compares three ways of fusing all three
to predict SAP and EI scores.
What made it hard
The interesting failure was not in the architecture but in the split.
Addresses repeat across an EPC dataset — the same property, reassessed —
so a random split leaks a building from training into test
and every model looks better than it is.
Regrouping the split by property changed the results
and meant redrawing the figures.
Beyond the model
A household energy simulator sits alongside it,
so a retrofit scenario can be run on a single property
rather than argued about in the abstract.