An energy estimation framework for event-based methods in Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is a set of techniques used to estimate the electricity consumed by individual appliances in a building from measurements of the total electrical consumption. Most commonly, NILM works by first attributing any significant change in the total power consumption (also known as an event) to a specific load and subsequently using these attributions (i.e. the labels for the events) to estimate energy for each load. For this last step, most published work in the field makes simplifying assumptions to make the problem more tractable. In this paper, we present a framework for creating appliance models based on classification labels and aggregate power measurements that can help to relax many of these assumptions. Our framework automatically builds models for appliances to perform energy estimation. The model relies on feature extraction, clustering via affinity propagation, perturbation of extracted states to ensure that they mimic appliance behavior, creation of finite state models, correction of any errors in classification that might violate the model, and estimation of energy based on corrected labels. We evaluate our framework on 3 houses from standard datasets in the field and show that the framework can learn data-driven models based on event labels and use that to estimate energy with lower error margins (e.g., 1.1–42.3%) than when using the heuristic models used by others.