A novel non-intrusive load monitoring technique using semi-supervised deep learning framework for smart grid

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is a technique which extracts individual appliance consumption and operation state change information from the aggregate power consumption made by a single residential or commercial unit. NILM plays a pivotal role in modernizing building energy management by disaggregating total energy consumption into individual appliance-level insights. This enables informed decision-making, energy optimization, and cost reduction. However, NILM encounters substantial challenges like signal noise, data availability, and data privacy concerns, necessitating advanced algorithms and robust methodologies to ensure accurate and secure energy disaggregation in real-world scenarios. Deep learning techniques have recently shown some promising results in NILM research, but training these neural networks requires significant labeled data. Obtaining initial sets of labeled data for the research by installing smart meters at the end of consumers’ appliances is laborious and expensive and exposes users to severe privacy risks. It is also important to mention that most NILM research uses empirical observations instead of proper mathematical approaches to obtain the threshold value for determining appliance operation states (On/Off) from their respective energy consumption value. This paper proposes a novel semi-supervised multilabel deep learning technique based on temporal convolutional network (TCN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) for classifying appliance operation states from labeled and unlabeled data. The two thresholding techniques, namely Middle-Point Thresholding and Variance-Sensitive Thresholding, which are needed to derive the threshold values for determining appliance operation states, are also compared thoroughly. The superiority of the proposed model, along with finding the appliance states through the Middle-Point Thresholding method, is demonstrated through 15% improved overall improved F1_micro score and almost 26% improved Hamming loss, F1 and Specificity score for the performance of individual appliance when compared to the benchmarking techniques that also used semi-supervised learning approach.