An Incremental Radial Basis Function Network Based on Information Granules and Its Application

This paper is concerned with the design of an Incremental Radial Basis Function Network (IRBFN) by combining Linear Regression (LR) and local RBFN for the prediction of heating load and cooling load in residential buildings. Here the proposed IRBFN is designed by building a collection of information granules through Context-based Fuzzy C-Means (CFCM) clustering algorithm that is guided by the distribution of error of the linear part of the LR model. After adopting a construct of a LR as global model, refine it through local RBFN that captures remaining and more localized nonlinearities of the system to be considered. The experiments are performed on the estimation of energy performance of 768 diverse residential buildings. The experimental results revealed that the proposed IRBFN showed good performance in comparison to LR, the standard RBFN, RBFN with information granules, and Linguistic Model (LM).