DP-AMI-FL: Secure Framework for Machine Learning-based AMI Applications

Machine Learning (ML) algorithms have shown quite promising applications in smart meter data analytics enabling intelligent energy management systems for the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). One of the major challenges in developing ML applications for the AMI is to preserve user privacy while allowing active end-users participation. This paper addresses this challenge and proposes Differential Privacy-enabled AMI with Federated Learning (DP-AMI-FL), framework for ML-based applications in the AMI. This framework provides two layers of privacy protection: first, it keeps the raw data of consumers hosting ML applications at edge devices (smart meters) with Federated Learning (FL), and second, it obfuscates the ML models using Differential Privacy (DP) to avoid privacy leakage threats on the models posed by various inference attacks. The framework is evaluated by analyzing its performance on a use case aimed to improve Short-Term Load Forecasting (STLF) for residential consumers having smart meters and home energy management systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the framework when used with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network models, achieves high forecasting accuracy while preserving users data privacy.