An Open Problem: Energy Data Super-Resolution

Abstract

In this notes paper, we present an open problem to the Buildsys community: energy data super-resolution, referring to the task of estimating the power consumption of a home at a higher resolution given the low-resolution power consumption. Super-resolution is especially useful when the smart meters collect data at a very low-sampling rate owing to a plethora of issues such as bandwidth, pricing, old hardware, among others. The problem is motivated by the success of image super resolution in the computer vision community. In this paper, we formally introduce the problem and present baseline methods and the algorithms we used to "solve" this problem. We evaluate the performance of the algorithms on a real-world dataset and discuss the results. We also discuss what makes this problem hard and why a trivial baseline is hard to beat.