Analysis Co-Sparse Coding for Energy Disaggregation

Abstract: Energy disaggregation is the task of segregating the aggregate energy of the entire building (as logged by the smartmeter) into the energy consumed by individual appliances. This is a single channel (the only channel being the smart-meter) blind source (different electrical appliances) separation problem. In recent times dictionary learning based approaches have shown promise in addressing the disaggregation problem. The usual technique is to learn a dictionary for every device and use the learnt dictionaries as basis for blind source separation during disaggregation. Dictionary learning is a synthesis formulation; in this work, we propose an analysis approach. The advantage of our proposed approach is that, the requirement of training volume drastically reduces compared to state-of-the-art techniques. This means that, we require fewer instrumented homes, or fewer days of instrumentation per home; in either case this drastically reduces the sensing cost. Results on two benchmark datasets show that our method produces the same level of disaggregation accuracy as state-of-the-art methods but with only a fraction of the training data.