Non-intrusive residential electricity load decomposition via low-resource model transferring

Abstract

Non-intrusive load decomposition (NILD) technology has a broad application prospect because it can deeply excavate the internal electricity consumption data of customers and obtain electricity consumption information. A non-intrusive load decomposition method based on model transfer is proposed to address the problem of insufficient accumulation of historical electricity consumption data of some household customers. Firstly, Time2vec, an embedding layer with time vectors, is introduced as an encoder to convert the time series into a continuous vector space, which improves the computational efficiency of the model for power time series information. Then, by introducing the Channel-wise attention mechanism, favorable residential electricity load characteristics can be effectively obtained. The model transfer method is used to fine-tune the pre-trained model based on complete data to overcome the problem of insufficient accumulation of historical electricity consumption data of some households. The experimental results show that the proposed method is a significant improvement over the existing state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method significantly improves the accuracy of load decomposition while reducing the model parameters. The model parameters are reduced by 62.4%, and the average absolute error is reduced by 13.8%–59.3%. Even with a small number of data training source domains, the proposed method is still able to accurately obtain the power consumption information of each appliance, proving that the proposed method overcomes the problem of insufficient accumulation of electricity consumption data of household users.