Estimation of high-dimensional factor models and its application in power data analysis

In dealing with high-dimensional data, factor models are often used for reducing dimensions and extracting relevant information. The spectrum of covariance matrices from power data exhibits two aspects: 1) bulk, which arises from random noise or fluctuations and 2) spikes, which represents factors caused by anomaly events. In this paper, we propose a new approach to the estimation of high-dimensional factor models, minimizing the distance between the empirical spectral density (ESD) of covariance matrices of the residuals of power data that are obtained by subtracting principal components and the limiting spectral density (LSD) from a multiplicative covariance structure model. The free probability techniques in random matrix theory (RMT) are used to calculate the spectral density of the multiplicative covariance model, which efficiently solves the computational difficulties. The proposed approach connects the estimation of the number of factors to the LSD of covariance matrices of the residuals, which provides estimators of the number of factors and the correlation structure information in the residuals. Considering a lot of measurement noise is contained in power data and the correlation structure is complex for the residuals from power data, the approach prefers approaching the ESD of covariance matrices of the residuals through a multiplicative covariance model, which avoids making crude assumptions or simplifications on the complex structure of the data. Theoretical studies show the proposed approach is robust to noise and sensitive to the presence of weak factors. The synthetic data from IEEE 118-bus power system is used to validate the effectiveness of the approach. Furthermore, the application to the analysis of the real-world online monitoring data in a power grid shows that the estimators in the approach can be used to indicate the system states.