Considerations on Energy Consumption Prediction in Residential Sector during the COVID-19 Pandemic Conditions using Artificial Neural Networks

After almost twenty years of successful work and promising research in predicting different energy consumptions by developing, training and using artificial neural networks, a new challenge arises in the last two years. The COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and public health measures changed most of the established energy consumption patterns, brought new variables into consideration and took everyone by surprise. The result can be seen in the energy and material crisis that is unfolding as we speak. Our goal in this paper is establishing new ways of approaching public and private energy policies by using machine learning and artificial neural network predictions.