Improving Residential Load Disaggregation for Sustainable Development of Energy via Principal Component Analysis

The useful planning and operation of the energy system requires a sustainability assessment of the system, in which the load model adopted is the most important factor in sustainability assessment. Having information about energy consumption patterns of the appliances allows consumers to manage their energy consumption efficiently. Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is an effective tool to recognize power consumption patterns from the measured data in meters. In this paper, an unsupervised approach based on dimensionality reduction is applied to identify power consumption patterns of home electrical appliances. This approach can be utilized to classify household activities of daily life using data measured from home electrical smart meters. In the proposed method, the power consumption curves of the electrical appliances, as high-dimensional data, are mapped to a low-dimensional space by preserving the highest data variance via principal component analysis (PCA). In this paper, the reference energy disaggregation dataset (REDD) has been used to verify the proposed method. REDD is related to real-world measurements recorded at low-frequency. The presented results reveal the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method in comparison to conventional procedures of NILM.