Augmenting Explainable Data-Driven Models in Energy Systems: A Python Framework for Feature Engineering

Data-driven modeling is an approach in energy systems modeling that has been gaining popularity. In data-driven modeling, machine learning methods such as linear regression, neural networks or decision-tree based methods are applied. While these methods do not require domain knowledge, they are sensitive to data quality. Therefore, improving data quality in a dataset is beneficial for creating machine learning-based models. The improvement of data quality can be implemented through preprocessing methods. A selected type of preprocessing is feature engineering, which focuses on evaluating and improving the quality of certain features inside the dataset. Feature engineering includes methods such as feature creation, feature expansion, or feature selection. In this work, a Python framework containing different feature engineering methods is presented. This framework contains different methods for feature creation, expansion and selection; in addition, methods for transforming or filtering data are implemented. The implementation of the framework is based on the Python library scikit-learn. The framework is demonstrated on a use case from energy demand prediction. A data-driven model is created including selected feature engineering methods. The results show an improvement in prediction accuracy through the engineered features.