Warwick R User Group: Wed, Feb 1, 5-6pm, online

The next meeting of the Warwick R User Group will take place online, Wednesday, February 1, 5-6pm.

Speaker: Ellen Zapata-Webborn (Senior Research Fellow in Data Science and End Use Energy Demand, UCL Energy Institute)

Title: Using Predictive Modelling to Study the Impact of COVID-19 on Energy Consumption

Abstract: How did COVID-19 affect household energy consumption in the UK? How did changes continue or change in the 2 years since the start of lockdown 1? How have different types of households been affected differently? To answer these questions, we developed elastic net regression and neural network models to predict what would have happened in the absence of the pandemic and compared these ‘counterfactuals’ with observed electricity and gas consumption in several hundred households. The analysis was all done in R, with packages data.table, caret, glmnet, and xgboost doing most of the heavy lifting. In this talk I’ll describe our approaches, the challenges we faced along the way, and what we found out.

You can sign up for the event and get the meeting link on the meetup page:

https://www.meetup.com/warwickrug/events/290999481/Link opens in a new window