New NILM paper on Comparability!

Dear all,

we proudly announce our latest NILM paper on comparability in NILM scholarship. In this paper, we discuss data noise, appliance events as well as performance evaluation in general. The paper is to be presented at 2020 IEEE Power & Energy Society Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference (ISGT) in Washington DC.

Abstract

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) comprises of a set of techniques that provide insights into the energy consumption of households and industrial facilities. Latest contributions show significant improvements in terms of accuracy and generalisation abilities. Despite all progress made concerning disaggregation techniques, performance evaluation and comparability remains an open research question. The lack of standardisation and consensus on evaluation procedures makes reproducibility and comparability extremely difficult.
In this paper, we draw attention to comparability in NILM with a focus on highlighting the considerable differences amongst common energy datasets used to test the performance of algorithms. We divide discussion on comparability into data aspects, performance metrics, and give a close view on evaluation processes. Detailed information on pre-processing as well as data cleaning methods, the importance of unified performance reporting, and the need for complexity measures in load disaggregation are found to be the most urgent issues in NILM-related research.  In addition, our evaluation suggests that datasets should be chosen carefully. We conclude by formulating suggestions for future work to enhance comparability.


Get the paper here.   -   Explore supplemental material here.

Please direct feedback and further comments to klemenjak@ieee.org

Have a great day,

Christoph