Optimization of Household Energy use Prediction Using Random Forest with Genetic Algorithm Feature Selection

Abstract

Electrical energy consumption continues to increase every year, so accurate prediction models are needed to support household electrical energy efficiency. This study analyzed high-resolution household electricity consumption data using the Random Forest (RF) algorithm and evaluated the influence of feature selection based on Genetic Algorithms (GA) in improving the performance of RF predictions. The base RF model achieves an RMSE of 0.6148, a MAE of 0.3478, and an R² of 0.5047. After implementing GA-based feature selection, the RF model with GA yields an RMSE of 0.6125 and an R² of 0.5084, indicating a marginal performance improvement. However, the MAE value increased slightly to 0.3503, which suggests that the increase was not uniform across the evaluation metrics. Overall, the RF approach with GA offers a modest improvement in prediction stability but with very limited accuracy gains, which highlights its potential and limitations in optimizing household energy consumption prediction.