Decision-Refillable-Based Shared Feature-Guided Fuzzy Classification for Personal Thermal Comfort

Abstract

Different types of buildings in different climate zones have their own design specifications and specific user populations. Generally speaking, these populations have similar sensory feedbacks in their perception of environmental thermal comfort. Existing thermal comfort models do not incorporate personal thermal comfort models for specific populations. In terms of an algorithm, the existing work constructs machine learning models based on an established human thermal comfort database with variables such as indoor temperature, clothing insulation, et al., and has achieved satisfactory classification results. More importantly, such thermal comfort models often lack scientific interpretability. Therefore, this study selected a specific population as the research object, adopted the 0-order Takagi–Sugeno–Kang (TSK) fuzzy classifier as the base training unit, and constructed a shared feature-guided new TSK fuzzy classification algorithm with extra feature compensation (SFG-TFC) to explore the perception features of the population in the thermal environment of buildings and to improve the classification performance and interpretability of the model. First, the shared features of subdatasets collected in different time periods were extracted. Second, the extra features of each subdataset were independently trained, and the rule outputs corresponding to the key shared features were reprojected into the corresponding fuzzy classifiers. This strategy not only highlights the guiding role of shared features but also considers the important compensation effect of extra features; thereby, improving the classification performance of the entire classification model. Finally, the least learning machine (LLM) was used to solve the parameters of the “then” part of each basic training unit, and these output weights were integrated to enhance the generalization performance of the model. The experimental results demonstrate that SFG-TFC has better classification performance and interpretability than the classic nonfuzzy algorithms support vector machine (SVM) and deep belief network (DBN), the 0-order TSK, and the multilevel optimization and fuzzy approximation algorithm QI-TSK.