Analysing the determinants of the Turkish household electricity consumption using gradient boosting regression tree

Residential buildings are the second largest electricity consumer in Turkey. Thus, the goal here is to detect the factors that determine the electricity consumption of the households in Turkey using the Household Budget Survey (HBS). This study applies Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF) and Gradient Boosted Regression Tree (GBRT) methods. Since the GBRT method provides the lowest Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), the impact of each variable on the electricity consumption is analysed with this method. The most critical determinant is found to be the household size, while income level and heating type are discovered as 2nd and 3rd most prominent determinants for household electricity demand. With the help of the Partial Dependence Plots (PDP) provided by the GBRT method, the impact of each categorical and continuous variable is presented. Using the results of PDPs, the monetary values of both electricity generation and the social cost of CO₂ emissions emitted into the atmosphere due to electricity generation are calculated for the most important determinants.