Experimental analysis of support vector machines with different kernels based on non-intrusive monitoring data

The estimation of the states of household electric appliances has served as the first application of support vector machines in the power system research field. Thus, it is imperative for power system research field to evaluate the support vector machine on this task from a practical point of view. We use the data proposed in Onoda and Ratsch (2000) for this purpose. We put particular emphasis on comparing different types of support vector machines obtained by choosing different kernels. We report results for polynomial kernels, radial basis function kernels, and sigmoid kernels. In the estimation of the states of household electric appliances, the results for the three different kernels achieved different error rates. We also put particular emphasis on comparing the different capacity of support vector machines obtained by choosing different regularization constants and parameters of kernels. The results show that the choice of regularization constants and parameters of kernels is as important as the choice of kernel functions for real world applications.