Dimensionality Expansion of Load Monitoring Time Series and Transfer Learning for EMS

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel load monitoring method using dimensionality expansion and transfer learning, demonstrating high accuracy and efficiency across multiple datasets for energy management systems.

Contribution

It proposes a new feature expansion technique and transfer learning approach that improve load monitoring accuracy and efficiency in building energy management systems.

Findings

Achieves an average weighted F1 score of 0.88 across datasets.

Requires 3 times fewer epochs for training in transfer learning.

Outperforms state-of-the-art in precision for unseen appliances.

Abstract

Energy management systems (EMS) rely on (non)-intrusive load monitoring (N)ILM to monitor and manage appliances and help residents be more energy efficient and thus more frugal. The robustness as well as the transfer potential of the most promising machine learning solutions for (N)ILM is not yet fully understood as they are trained and evaluated on relatively limited data. In this paper, we propose a new approach for load monitoring in building EMS based on dimensionality expansion of time series and transfer learning. We perform an extensive evaluation on 5 different low-frequency datasets. The proposed feature dimensionality expansion using video-like transformation and resource-aware deep learning architecture achieves an average weighted F1 score of 0.88 across the datasets with 29 appliances and is computationally more efficient compared to the state-of-the-art imaging methods. Investigating the proposed method for cross-dataset intra-domain transfer learning, we find that 1) our method performs with an average weighted F1 score of 0.80 while requiring 3-times fewer epochs for model training compared to the non-transfer approach, 2) can achieve an F1 score of 0.75 with only 230 data samples, and 3) our transfer approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in precision drop by up to 12 percentage points for unseen appliances.