A Visual Diagnostics Framework for District Heating Data: Enhancing Data Quality for AI-Driven Heat Consumption Prediction

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Christensen, Kristoffer, Jørgensen, Bo Nørregaard, Ma, Zheng Grace
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Christensen, Kristoffer
Jørgensen, Bo Nørregaard
Ma, Zheng Grace
author_facet Christensen, Kristoffer
Jørgensen, Bo Nørregaard
Ma, Zheng Grace
contents High-quality data is a prerequisite for training reliable Artificial Intelligence (AI) models in the energy domain. In district heating networks, sensor and metering data often suffer from noise, missing values, and temporal inconsistencies, which can significantly degrade model performance. This paper presents a systematic approach for evaluating and improving data quality using visual diagnostics, implemented through an interactive web-based dashboard. The dashboard employs Python-based visualization techniques, including time series plots, heatmaps, box plots, histograms, correlation matrices, and anomaly-sensitive KPIs such as skewness and anomaly detection based on the modified z-scores. These tools al-low human experts to inspect and interpret data anomalies, enabling a human-in-the-loop strategy for data quality assessment. The methodology is demonstrated on a real-world dataset from a Danish district heating provider, covering over four years of hourly data from nearly 7000 meters. The findings show how visual analytics can uncover systemic data issues and, in the future, guide data cleaning strategies that enhance the accuracy, stability, and generalizability of Long Short-Term Memory and Gated Recurrent Unit models for heat demand forecasting. The study contributes to a scalable, generalizable framework for visual data inspection and underlines the critical role of data quality in AI-driven energy management systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_00872
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Visual Diagnostics Framework for District Heating Data: Enhancing Data Quality for AI-Driven Heat Consumption Prediction
Christensen, Kristoffer
Jørgensen, Bo Nørregaard
Ma, Zheng Grace
Machine Learning
Human-Computer Interaction
High-quality data is a prerequisite for training reliable Artificial Intelligence (AI) models in the energy domain. In district heating networks, sensor and metering data often suffer from noise, missing values, and temporal inconsistencies, which can significantly degrade model performance. This paper presents a systematic approach for evaluating and improving data quality using visual diagnostics, implemented through an interactive web-based dashboard. The dashboard employs Python-based visualization techniques, including time series plots, heatmaps, box plots, histograms, correlation matrices, and anomaly-sensitive KPIs such as skewness and anomaly detection based on the modified z-scores. These tools al-low human experts to inspect and interpret data anomalies, enabling a human-in-the-loop strategy for data quality assessment. The methodology is demonstrated on a real-world dataset from a Danish district heating provider, covering over four years of hourly data from nearly 7000 meters. The findings show how visual analytics can uncover systemic data issues and, in the future, guide data cleaning strategies that enhance the accuracy, stability, and generalizability of Long Short-Term Memory and Gated Recurrent Unit models for heat demand forecasting. The study contributes to a scalable, generalizable framework for visual data inspection and underlines the critical role of data quality in AI-driven energy management systems.
title A Visual Diagnostics Framework for District Heating Data: Enhancing Data Quality for AI-Driven Heat Consumption Prediction
topic Machine Learning
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00872