Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring of Residential Water-Heating Circuit Using Ensemble Machine Learning Techniques

Abstract

The recent advancement in computational capabilities and deployment of smart meters have caused non-intrusive load monitoring to revive itself as one of the promising techniques of energy monitoring. Toward effective energy monitoring, this paper presents a non-invasive load inference approach assisted by feature selection and ensemble machine learning techniques. For evaluation and validation purposes of the proposed approach, one of the major residential load elements having solid potential toward energy efficiency applications, i.e., water heating, is considered. Moreover, to realize the real-life deployment, digital simulations are carried out on low-sampling real-world load measurements: New Zealand GREEN Grid Database. For said purposes, MATLAB and Python (Scikit-Learn) are used as simulation tools. The employed learning models, i.e., standalone and ensemble, are trained on a single household’s load data and later tested rigorously on a set of diverse households’ load data, to validate the generalization capability of the employed models. This paper presents a comprehensive performance evaluation of the presented approach in the context of event detection, feature selection, and learning models. Based on the presented study and corresponding analysis of the results, it is concluded that the proposed approach generalizes well to the unseen testing data and yields promising results in terms of non-invasive load inference.