A Holistic Investigation of the Relationships Between Indoor Environmental Quality, Occupant Behaviour and Comfort in Residential Buildings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Residential buildings play a critical role in occupant comfort, which is influenced by factors such as indoor environmental quality (IEQ), behaviour, and preferences. Despite extensive research on occupant comfort in buildings, comprehensive studies in residential buildings, where people spend over 65% of their time, are relatively scarce. This study addresses gaps by introducing a structured and holistic framework for studying the relationships between IEQ, occupant behaviour, and comfort in residential buildings. Key advancements of the framework include the integration of subjective and objective data collection methods, the extension of data collection to capture long-term trends, and the simultaneous consideration of multiple IEQ parameters, occupant behaviours, and comfort dimensions from diverse perspectives. By applying the framework in two high-performance residential buildings in Canada, the study found that participants’ comfort votes generally aligned with IEQ conditions. Air temperature, humidity, and CO₂ levels emerged as key environmental contributors to thermal and IAQ comfort. Windows and ceiling fans usage was closely linked to comfort, with ceiling fans often maintaining thermal comfort effectively. Bayesian mixture regression models showed seasonal shifts in preferences for IEQ parameters, highlighting an aspect that has been underexplored in previous research. This research provides valuable methodological insights, particularly emphasizing the importance of integrating objective monitoring data with subjective comfort feedback to better contextualize and interpret comfort, adaptive behaviours, and environmental conditions. The data analysis and discussion demonstrated the value of combining both subjective and objective long-term data. These findings offer a starting point for future research into the complex relationships between IEQ, occupant behaviour, and comfort in residential environments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".