In this paper, we utilize a Gaussian process to predict the power consumption in the air-conditioning system. As the power consumption in the air-conditioning system takes a form of a time-series and the prediction of the power consumption becomes very important from the perspective of the efficient energy management, it is worth to investigate the time-series model for the prediction of the power consumption. To this end, we apply the Gaussian process to predict the power consumption, in which the Gaussian process provides a prior probability to every possible function and higher probabilities are given to functions that are more likely consistent with the empirical data. We also discuss how to estimate the hyper-parameters, which are parameters in the covariance function of the Gaussian process model. We estimated the hyper-parameters with two different methods (marginal likelihood and leave-one-out cross validation) and obtained a model that pertinently describes the data and the results are more or less independent of the estimation method of hyper-parameters. We validated the prediction results by the error analysis of the mean relative error and the mean absolute error. The mean relative error analysis showed that about 3.4% of the predicted value came from the error, and the mean absolute error analysis confirmed that the error in within the standard deviation of the predicted value. We also adopt the non-parametric Wilcoxon’s sign-rank test to assess the fitness of the proposed model and found that the null hypothesis of uniformity was accepted under the significance level of 5%. These results can be applied to a more elaborate control of the power consumption in the air-conditioning system.

Most of process data control have been designed under the assumption that there are independence between observed data. However, it has been difficult to apply the traditional method to real-time data because they are autocorrelated, and they are not norm