Advancing Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring: Predicting Appliance-Level Power Consumption With Indirect Supervision

Abstract

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have made significant progress in addressing the Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) task, which aims to disaggregate appliance-level power signals from aggregated meter readings. Despite these advancements, existing DNN-based NILM approaches rely on training with power signals from individual appliances, which are obtained intrusively through sensor installations. This method is not only expensive but also poses a risk of damaging the original circuits. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the State-based Supervised NILM (SS-NILM) problem. Instead of using appliance power signal labels, we leverage on-off state information, which can be collected in a non-intrusive manner. However, solving SS-NILM presents a challenge, as it requires developing a model that maps on-off state labels to the corresponding appliance power signals in an indirectly supervised setting. In this work, we propose a state-based DNN that predicts the power signals of multiple target appliances simultaneously. The model is trained by minimizing the discrepancy between the aggregated prediction and the true aggregated power signal. Additionally, the model predicts the on-off states of appliances, which are used as auxiliary information to improve the accuracy of power signal predictions. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that our model, trained using non-intrusive on-off state information, achieves performance comparable to that of traditional NILM models.