Occupancy estimation from environmental parameters using wrapper and hybrid feature selection

Occupancy information is essential to facilitate demand-driven operations of air-conditioning and mechanical ventilation (ACMV) systems. Environmental sensors are increasingly being explored as cost effective and non-intrusive means to obtain the occupancy information. This requires the extraction and selection of useful features from the sensor data. In past works, feature selection has generally been implemented using filter-based approaches. In this work, we introduce the use of wrapper and hybrid feature selection for better occupancy estimation. To achieve a fast computation time, we introduce a ranking-based incremental search in our algorithms, which is more efficient than the exhaustive search used in past works. For wrapper feature selection, we propose the WRANK-ELM, which searches an ordered list of features using the extreme learning machine (ELM) classifier. For hybrid feature selection, we propose the RIG-ELM, which is a filter–wrapper hybrid that uses the relative information gain (RIG) criterion for feature ranking and the ELM for the incremental search. We present experimental results in an office space with a multi-sensory network to validate the proposed algorithms.