A weakly supervised active learning framework for non-intrusive load monitoring

Energy efficiency is at a critical point now with rising energy prices and decarbonisation of the residential sector to meet the global NetZero agenda. Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring is a software-based technique to monitor individual appliances inside a building from a single aggregate meter reading and recent approaches are based on supervised deep learning. Such approaches are affected by practical constraints related to labelled data collection, particularly when a pre-trained model is deployed in an unknown target environment and needs to be adapted to the new data domain. In this case, transfer learning is usually adopted and the end-user is directly involved in the labelling process. Unlike previous literature, we propose a combined weakly supervised and active learning approach to reduce the quantity of data to be labelled and the end user effort in providing the labels. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method comparing it to a transfer learning approach based on weak supervision. Our method reduces the quantity of weakly annotated data required by up to 82.6–98.5% in four target domains while improving the appliance classification performance.