Abstract

Accurate forecasting of energy consumption in sensor-rich environments remains challenging due to strong inter-sensor dependencies, temporal variability, and heterogeneous sensor behavior. This paper proposes a lightweight and interpretable multi-sensor fusion framework for short-term energy consumption forecasting. The heterogeneous sensor dataset is first preprocessed to handle missing values, outliers, and temporal misalignment, followed by synchronization of the multivariate signals on a common timeline to enable consistent learning. The proposed framework systematically investigates multiple strategies for exploiting information from synchronized multi-sensor data without performing explicit feature elimination or time-lag engineering. In particular, three fusion paradigms are considered: (i) Early Fusion, where all sensor measurements are jointly used as input features for a multivariate regression model; (ii) Late Fusion, where individual sensor predictors are trained independently and their outputs are combined using reliability-based weighting; and (iii) an attention-inspired fusion strategy, in which adaptive weights are assigned to sensor-level predictions based on their predictive reliability estimated from training errors and normalized via a softmax function. In addition, classical machine learning models including Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Regression (SVR), and Gradient Boosting (GB) are evaluated under the same experimental conditions to provide a consistent benchmark. Experimental results on a real-world building energy monitoring dataset consisting of nine heterogeneous sensors demonstrate that multi-sensor fusion approaches consistently improve forecasting performance compared to single-model baselines. Among the evaluated strategies, Late Fusion provides stable performance across strongly correlated loads, while the attention-inspired fusion strategy exhibits improved robustness when handling sensors with varying predictive reliability. To ensure robustness and reproducibility, results are reported using multiple chronological validation splits, with performance evaluated in terms of RMSE, MAE, and R2 along with statistical measures including standard deviation and confidence intervals. The proposed framework provides a practical balance between predictive accuracy, interpretability, and computational efficiency, making it suitable for smart building energy management and real-world deployment scenarios.

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