Low frequency residential non-intrusive load monitoring based on a hybrid feature extraction tree-learning approach

ABSTRACT

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), or else energy disaggregation, aims at decomposing the aggregated energy consumption data, estimating the contribution of each appliance to the total building energy consumption. The current paper introduces a supervised algorithm for the accurate estimation of both power consumption and operational state of the appliances. A hybrid feature set consisting of electrical, temporal, and statistical features is utilized, focusing on steady state information, due to the low sampling rate (1 minute). The contribution of each feature category is experimentally validated. A predictive model is built for each appliance, utilizing Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGBM) regression algorithm, which is a tree-based technique with accelerated training time and low computational cost. The results obtained, exploiting both private and public datasets, indicate that the proposed algorithm is able to disaggregate most of the appliances with high accuracy. The average f-score across all the disaggregated appliances is calculated at 0.77 and 0.86 for the private and the public dataset, respectively. The proposed models have also been benchmarked against other top state-of-the-art approaches, achieving high performance with high rank.

KEYWORDS:

• Non-intrusive-load-monitoring disaggregation LGBM smart grid benchmark

Acknowledgments

This work is partially funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme through PRECEPT project under Grant Agreement No. 958284. The authors would also like to thank Mr. Athanasios Salamanis for his valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christos Timplalexis

Christos Timplalexis received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2017 from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the MSc in Data Science in 2019 from the International Hellenic University. He is currently working as a Research Assistant in the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas with his research interests focusing on smart grid applications, microgrids, time-series forecasting and energy analytics.

Georgios-Fotios Angelis

Georgios-Fotios Angelis received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2020 from the Democritus University of Thrace. He is currently working as a Research Assistant in the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas with his research interests focusing on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring, computer vision, 3D face reconstruction and transformer models.

Stelios Krinidis

Stelios Krinidis received the Diploma degree and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, in 1999 and 2004, respectively, both from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. From 1999 to 2004, he was a researcher and teaching assistant in the Department of Informatics, University of Thessaloniki. He is currently working as a Postdoctoral Research fellow for the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas and as an Assistant Professor for the Management Science and Technology Department of the International Hellenic University. His research interests are focusing on computational intelligence, pattern recognition, computer vision, 2D and 3D image processing and analysis and smart buildings.

Dimosthenis Ioannidis

Dimosthenis Ioannidis received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering and the master’s degree in Advanced Communication Systems and Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2000 and 2005, respectively. He also received his PhD from the University of Patras in 2017. From 2006, he has been working at the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, where he currently holds a Researcher Grade C’ position. He research interests focus on power systems, biometrics and web semantics.

Dimitrios Tzovaras

Dimitrios Tzovaras received the Diploma and Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in 1992 and 1997, respectively. He is currently a Senior Researcher (Grade A’) and the Director of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas. His main research interests include visual analytics, three-dimensional object recognition, search and retrieval, behavioral biometrics, assistive technologies, information and knowledge management, computer graphics, and virtual reality.