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Energy disaggregation is to discover the energy consumption of individual appliances from their aggregated energy values. To solve the problem, most existing approaches rely on either appliances' signatures or their state transition patterns, both hard to obtain in practice. Aiming at developing a simple, universal model that works without depending on sophisticated machine learning techniques or auxiliary equipments, we make use of easily accessible knowledge of appliances and the sparsity of the switching events to design a Sparse Switching Event Recovering (SSER) method. By minimizing the total variation (TV) of the (sparse) event matrix, SSER can effectively recover the individual energy consumption values from the aggregated ones. To speed up the process, a Parallel Local Optimization Algorithm (PLOA) is proposed to solve the problem in active epochs of appliance activities in parallel. Using real-world trace data, we compare the performance of our method with that of the state-of-the-art solutions, including Least Square Estimation (LSE) and iterative Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The results show that our approach has an overall higher detection accuracy and a smaller overhead., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, and 4 tables

In power systems, load curve data is one of the most important datasets that are collected and retained by utilities. The quality of load curve data, however, is hard to guarantee since the data is subject to communication losses, meter malfunctions, and many other impacts. In this paper, a new approach to analyzing load curve data is presented. The method adopts a new view, termed \textit{portrait}, on the load curve data by analyzing the periodic patterns in the data and re-organizing the data for ease of analysis. Furthermore, we introduce algorithms to build the virtual portrait load curve data, and demonstrate its application on load curve data cleansing. Compared to existing regression-based methods, our method is much faster and more accurate for both small-scale and large-scale real-world datasets., Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures

Load curve data in power systems refers to users' electrical energy consumption data periodically collected with meters. It has become one of the most important assets for modern power systems. Many operational decisions are made based on the information discovered in the data. Load curve data, however, usually suffers from corruptions caused by various factors, such as data transmission errors or malfunctioning meters. To solve the problem, tremendous research efforts have been made on load curve data cleansing. Most existing approaches apply outlier detection methods from the supply side (i.e., electricity service providers), which may only have aggregated load data. In this paper, we propose to seek aid from the demand side (i.e., electricity service users). With the help of readily available knowledge on consumers' appliances, we present a new appliance-driven approach to load curve data cleansing. This approach utilizes data generation rules and a Sequential Local Optimization Algorithm (SLOA) to solve the Corrupted Data Identification Problem (CDIP). We evaluate the performance of SLOA with real-world trace data and synthetic data. The results indicate that, comparing to existing load data cleansing methods, such as B-spline smoothing, our approach has an overall better performance and can effectively identify consecutive corrupted data. Experimental results also demonstrate that our method is robust in various tests. Our method provides a highly feasible and reliable solution to an emerging industry application., Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures; update: modified title and introduction, and corrected some typos