Robust event detection for residential load disaggregation

Nonintrusive load monitoring (NILM) can facilate the transition to energy-efficient and low-carbon buildings. Event detection is the first and most critical step in event-based NILM and can improve the efficiency and performance of NILM by decreasing inference times to the number of events with transient features extracted from events. However, existing event detection methods with fixed parameters may fail to achieve high accuracy in the case of uncertain and complicated residential load changes such as high fluctuation, long transition, and near simultaneity in both power and time dimensions. Besides, it is difficult to transfer the fixed parameter to new households with different load profiles. Furthermore, most of these methods prove that they are able to detect events but not able to extract features for load disaggregation. This paper proposes a robust event detection method with adaptive parameters to deal with such issues. Specifically, a window with adaptive margins, multi-window screening, and adaptive threshold method is proposed to detect events in aggregated load data with high sampling rate (>1 Hz). The proposed method captures the transitions by adaptively tuning parameters including window width, margin width, and thresholds. It can also achieve good performance with blind parameter setting so that it is suitable for unknown households or datasets. Furthermore, it captures complete transitions that are indispensable for transient feature extraction. Case studies on a 20 Hz dataset, the 50 Hz LIFTED dataset, and the 60 Hz BLUED dataset show that the proposed method can robustly outperform other state-of-the-art event detection methods. The robust performance of the proposed method is also verified by a cross validation of parameters among different datasets. Lastly, the proposed event detection method is demonstrated to have the merits of improving the performance of load disaggregation.