Near Real-Time Appliance Recognition Using Low Frequency Monitoring and Active Learning Methods

Abstract Electricity load monitoring in residential buildings has become an important task allowing for energy consumption understanding, indirect human activity recognition and occupancy modelling. In this context, Non Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is an approach based on the analysis of the global electricity consumption signal of the habitation. Current NILM solutions are reaching good precision for the identification of electrical devices but at the cost of difficult setups with expensive equipments typically working at high frequency. In this work we propose to use a low-cost and easy to install low frequency sensor for which we improve the performances with an active machine learning strategy. At setup, the system is able to identify some appliances with typical signatures such as a fridge. During usage, the system detects unknown signatures and provides a user-friendly procedure to include new appliances and to improve the identification precision over time.