Enhancing Machine Learning Classification for Electrical Time Series Applications

Machine learning applications to electrical time series data will have wide-ranging impacts in the near future. Electricity disaggregation holds the promise of reducing billions of dollars of electrical waste every year. In the power grid, automatic classification of disturbance events detected by phasor measurement units could prevent cascading blackouts before they occur. Additional applications include better market segmentation by utility companies, improved design of appliances, and reliable incorporation of renewable energy resources into the power grid. However, existing machine learning methods remain unimplemented in the real world because of limiting assumptions that hinder performance. My research contributions are summarized as follows: In electricity disaggregation, I introduced the first label correction approach for supervised training samples. For unsupervised disaggregation, I introduced event detection that does not require parameter tuning and appliance discovery that makes no assumptions on appliance types. These improvements produce better accuracy, faster computation, and more scalability than any previously introduced method and can be applied to natural gas disaggregation, water disaggregation, and other source separation domains. My current work challenges long-held assumptions in time series shapelets, a classification tool with applicability in electrical time series and dozens of additional domains.