Dataport and NILMTK: A building data set designed for non-intrusive load monitoring

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), or energy disaggregation, is the process of using signal processing and machine learning to separate the energy consumption of a building into individual appliances. In recent years, a number of data sets have been released in order to evaluate such approaches, which contain both building-level and appliance-level energy data. However, these data sets typically cover less than 10 households due to the financial cost of such deployments, and are not released in a format which allows the data sets to be easily used by energy disaggregation researchers. To this end, the Dataport database was created by Pecan Street Inc, which contains 1 minute circuit-level and building-level electricity data from 722 households. Furthermore, the non-intrusive load monitoring toolkit (NILMTK) was released in 2014, which provides software infrastructure to support energy disaggregation research, such as data set parsers, benchmark disaggregation algorithms and accuracy metrics. This paper describes the release of a subset of the Dataport database in NILMTK format, containing one month of electricity data from 669 households. Through the release of this Dataport data in NILMTK format, we pose a challenge to the signal processing community to produce energy disaggregation algorithms which are both accurate and scalable.