Toward Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring via Multi-Label Classification

Demand-side management technology is a key element of the proposed smart grid, which will help utilities make more efficient use of their generation assets by reducing consumers' energy demand during peak load periods. However, although some modern appliances can respond to price signals from the utility companies, there is a vast stock of older appliances that cannot. For such appliances, utilities must infer what appliances are operating in a home, given only the power signals on the main feeder to the home (i.e., the home's power consumption must be disaggregated into individual appliances). We report on an in-depth investigation of multi-label classification algorithms for disaggregating appliances in a power signal. A systematic review of this research topic shows that this class of algorithms has received little attention in the literature, even though it is arguably a more natural fit to the disaggregation problem than the traditional single-label classifiers used to date. We examine a multi-label meta-classification framework (RAkEL), and a bespoke multi-label classification algorithm (MLkNN), employing both time-domain and wavelet-domain feature sets. We test these classifiers on two real houses from the Reference Energy Disaggregation Dataset. We found that the multilabel algorithms are effective and competitive with published results on the datasets.