Mastering Predictive Analytics with R - Second Edition

Predicting the energy efficiency of buildings

In this section, we will investigate how neural networks can be used to solve a real-world regression problem. Once again, we turn to the UCI Machine Learning Repository for our dataset. We've chosen to try out the energy efficiency dataset available at http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Energy+efficiency. The prediction task is to use various building characteristics, such as surface area and roof area, in order to predict the energy efficiency of a building, which is expressed in the form of two different metrics--heating load and cooling load.

This is a good example for us to try out as we can demonstrate how neural networks can be used to predict two different outputs with a single network. ...