Clustering Residential Electricity Load Curves via Community Detection in Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel network-based community detection approach for clustering household load curves, improving accuracy and interpretability over traditional methods by considering inherent relationships among load curves.

Contribution

It converts load curve clustering into a community detection problem in a network, and develops a multi-layer profile directory for flexible analysis.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art clustering methods

Effectively captures relationships among load curves

Provides a multi-layer profile structure for practical applications

Abstract

Performing analytic of household load curves (LCs) has significant value in predicting individual electricity consumption patterns, and hence facilitate developing demand-response strategy, and finally achieve energy efficiency improvement and emission reduction. LC clustering is a widely used analytic technology, which discovers electricity consumption patterns by grouping similar LCs into same sub-groups. However, previous clustering methods treat each LC in the data set as an individual time series, ignoring the inherent relationship among different LCs, restraining the performance of the clustering methods. What's more, due to the significant volatility and uncertainty of LCs, the previous LC clustering approaches inevitably result in either lager number of clusters or huge variances within a cluster, which is unacceptable for actual application needs. In this paper, we proposed an integrated approach to address this issue. First, we converted the LC clustering task into the community detection task in network. Second, we proposed a clustering approach incorporated with community detection to improve the performance of LC clustering, which includes network construction, community detection and typical load profile extraction. The method convert the data set into a network in which the inherent relationship among LCs is represented by the edges of the network. Third, we construct a multi-layer typical load profile directory to make the trade-off between variances within a cluster and the number of the clusters, enabling the researchers to assess the LCs and the customers in different layers according to practical application requirements. The experiments demonstrate that our integrated approach outperform the state-of-the-art methods.