An anomaly detection method for identifying locations with abnormal behavior of temperature in school buildings

Time series data collected using wireless sensors, such as temperature and humidity, can provide insight into a building's heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system. Anomalies of these sensor measurements can be used to identify locations of a building that are poorly designed or maintained. Resolving the anomalies present in these locations can improve the thermal comfort of occupants, as well as improve air quality and energy efficiency levels in that space. In this study, we developed a scoring method to identify sensors that shows collective anomalies due to environmental issues. This leads to identifying problematic locations within commercial and institutional buildings. The Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) based anomaly detection method was applied to identify collective anomalies. Then, a score for each sensor was obtained by taking the weighted sum of the number of anomalies, vertical distance to an anomaly point, and dynamic time-warping distance. The weights were optimized using a well-defined simulation study and applying the grid search algorithm. Finally, using a synthetic data set and the results of a case study we could evaluate the performance of our developed scoring method. In conclusion, this newly developed scoring method successfully detects collective anomalies even with data collected over one week, compared to the machine learning models which need more data to train themselves.