An Approach for Assessing Clustering of Households by Electricity Usage

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to quantify household electricity usage variability and cluster households based on these measures to improve targeted energy efficiency initiatives.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach for representing and clustering household electricity usage variability using specific validity indexes.

Findings

Identified effective variability measures for household clustering

Evaluated cluster validity indexes like CDI and DBI

Tested approach on data from 180 UK households over a year

Abstract

How a household varies their regular usage of electricity is useful information for organisations to allow accurate targeting of behaviour modification initiatives with the aim of improving the overall efficiency of the electricity network. The variability of regular activities in a household is one possible indication of that household's willingness to accept incentives to change their behaviour. An approach is presented for identifying a way of representing the variability of a household's behaviour and developing an efficient way of clustering the households, using these measures of variability, into a few, usable groupings. To evaluate the effectiveness of the variability measures, a number of cluster validity indexes are explored with regard to how the indexes vary with the number of clusters, the number of attributes, and the quality of the attributes. The Cluster Dispersion Indicator (CDI) and the Davies-Boulden Indicator (DBI) are selected for future work developing various indicators of household behaviour variability. The approach is tested using data from 180 UK households monitored for over a year at a sampling interval of 5 minutes. Data is taken from the evening peak electricity usage period of 4pm to 8pm.