CaberNet: Causal Representation Learning for Cross-Domain HVAC Energy Prediction

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Hauptverfasser: Zhai, Kaiyuan, Cui, Jiacheng, Zhang, Zhehao, Xue, Junyu, Deng, Yang, Wu, Kui, Tang, Guoming
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhai, Kaiyuan
Cui, Jiacheng
Zhang, Zhehao
Xue, Junyu
Deng, Yang
Wu, Kui
Tang, Guoming
author_facet Zhai, Kaiyuan
Cui, Jiacheng
Zhang, Zhehao
Xue, Junyu
Deng, Yang
Wu, Kui
Tang, Guoming
contents Cross-domain HVAC energy prediction is essential for scalable building energy management, particularly because collecting extensive labeled data for every new building is both costly and impractical. Yet, this task remains highly challenging due to the scarcity and heterogeneity of data across different buildings, climate zones, and seasonal patterns. In particular, buildings situated in distinct climatic regions introduce variability that often leads existing methods to overfit to spurious correlations, rely heavily on expert intervention, or compromise on data diversity. To address these limitations, we propose CaberNet, a causal and interpretable deep sequence model that learns invariant (Markov blanket) representations for robust cross-domain prediction. In a purely data-driven fashion and without requiring any prior knowledge, CaberNet integrates i) a global feature gate trained with a self-supervised Bernoulli regularization to distinguish superior causal features from inferior ones, and ii) a domain-wise training scheme that balances domain contributions, minimizes cross-domain loss variance, and promotes latent factor independence. We evaluate CaberNet on real-world datasets collected from three buildings located in three climatically diverse cities, and it consistently outperforms all baselines, achieving a 22.9% reduction in normalized mean squared error (NMSE) compared to the best benchmark. Our code is available at https://github.com/SusCom-Lab/CaberNet-CRL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_06634
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CaberNet: Causal Representation Learning for Cross-Domain HVAC Energy Prediction
Zhai, Kaiyuan
Cui, Jiacheng
Zhang, Zhehao
Xue, Junyu
Deng, Yang
Wu, Kui
Tang, Guoming
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Cross-domain HVAC energy prediction is essential for scalable building energy management, particularly because collecting extensive labeled data for every new building is both costly and impractical. Yet, this task remains highly challenging due to the scarcity and heterogeneity of data across different buildings, climate zones, and seasonal patterns. In particular, buildings situated in distinct climatic regions introduce variability that often leads existing methods to overfit to spurious correlations, rely heavily on expert intervention, or compromise on data diversity. To address these limitations, we propose CaberNet, a causal and interpretable deep sequence model that learns invariant (Markov blanket) representations for robust cross-domain prediction. In a purely data-driven fashion and without requiring any prior knowledge, CaberNet integrates i) a global feature gate trained with a self-supervised Bernoulli regularization to distinguish superior causal features from inferior ones, and ii) a domain-wise training scheme that balances domain contributions, minimizes cross-domain loss variance, and promotes latent factor independence. We evaluate CaberNet on real-world datasets collected from three buildings located in three climatically diverse cities, and it consistently outperforms all baselines, achieving a 22.9% reduction in normalized mean squared error (NMSE) compared to the best benchmark. Our code is available at https://github.com/SusCom-Lab/CaberNet-CRL.
title CaberNet: Causal Representation Learning for Cross-Domain HVAC Energy Prediction
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06634