Deep Adaptive Ensemble Filter for Non-Intrusive Residential Load Monitoring

Identifying flexible loads, such as a heat pump, has an essential role in a home energy management system. In this study, an adaptive ensemble filtering framework integrated with long short-term memory (LSTM) is proposed for identifying flexible loads. The proposed framework, called AEFLSTM, takes advantage of filtering techniques and the representational power of LSTM for load disaggregation by filtering noise from the total power and learning the long-term dependencies of flexible loads. Furthermore, the proposed framework is adaptive and searches ensemble filtering techniques, including discrete wavelet transform, low-pass filter, and seasonality decomposition, to find the best filtering method for disaggregating different flexible loads (e.g., heat pumps). Experimental results are presented for estimating the electricity consumption of a heat pump, a refrigerator, and a dishwasher from the total power of a residential house in British Columbia (a publicly available use case). The results show that AEFLSTM can reduce the loss error (mean absolute error) by 57.4%, 44%, and 55.5% for estimating the power consumption of the heat pump, refrigerator, and dishwasher, respectively, compared to the stand-alone LSTM model. The proposed approach is used for another dataset containing measurements of an electric vehicle to further support the validity of the method. AEFLSTM is able to improve the result for disaggregating an electric vehicle by 22.5%.