Predicting unusual energy consumption events from smart home sensor network by data stream mining with misclassified recall

Abstract

With the popularity and affordability of ZigBee wireless sensor technology, IoT-based smart controlling system for home appliances becomes prevalent for smart home applications. From the data analytics point of view, one important objective from analyzing such IoT data is to gain insights from the energy consumption patterns, thereby trying to fine-tune the energy efficiency of the appliance usage. The data analytics usually functions at the back-end crunching over a large archive of big data accumulated over time for learning the overall pattern from the sensor data feeds. The other objective of the analytics, which may often be more crucial, is to predict and identify whether an abnormal consumption event is about to happen. For example, a sudden draw of energy that leads to hot spot in the power grid in a city, or black-out at home. This dynamic prediction is usually done at the operational level, with moving data stream, by data stream mining methods . In this paper, an improved version of very fast decision tree (VFDT) is proposed, which learns from misclassified results for the sake of filtering the noisy data from learning and maintaining sharp classification accuracy of the induced prediction model. Specifically, a new technique called misclassified recall (MR), which is a pre-processing step for self-rectifying misclassified instances, is formulated. In energy data prediction, most misclassified instances are due to data transmission errors or faulty devices. The former case happens intermittently, and the errors from the latter cause may persist for a long time. By caching up the data at the MR pre-processor, the one-pass online model learning can be effectively shielded in case of intermitting problems at the wireless sensor network; likewise the stored data could be investigated afterwards should the problem persist for long. Simulation experiments over a dataset about predicting exceptional appliances energy use in a low energy building are conducted. The reported results validate the efficacy of the new methodology VFDT + MR, in comparison to a collection of popular data stream mining algorithms from the literature.