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Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) techniques are central techniques to achieve the energy sustainability goals through the identification of operating appliances in the residential and industrial sectors, potentially leading to increased rates of energy savings. NILM received significant attention in the last decade, reflected by the number of contributions and systematic reviews published yearly. In this regard, the current paper provides a meta-analysis summarising existing NILM reviews to identify widely acknowledged findings concerning NILM scholarship in general and neural NILM algorithms in particular. In addition, this paper emphasizes federated neural NILM, receiving increasing attention due to its ability to preserve end-users' privacy. Typically, by combining several locally trained models, federated learning has excellent potential to train NILM models locally without communicating sensitive data with cloud servers. Thus, the second part of the current paper provides a summary of recent federated NILM frameworks with a focus on the main contributions of each framework and the achieved performance. Furthermore, we identify the non-availability of proper toolkits enabling easy experimentation with federated neural NILM as a primary barrier in the field. Thus, we extend existing toolkits with a federated component, made publicly available and conduct experiments on the REFIT energy dataset considering four different scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) techniques are central techniques to achieve the energy sustainability goals through the identification of operating appliances in the residential and industrial sectors, potentially leading to increased rates of energy savings. NILM received significant attention in the last decade, reflected by the number of contributions and systematic reviews published yearly. In this regard, the current paper provides a meta-analysis summarising existing NILM reviews to identify widely acknowledged findings concerning NILM scholarship in general and neural NILM algorithms in particular. In addition, this paper emphasizes federated neural NILM, receiving increasing attention due to its ability to preserve end-users’ privacy. Typically, by combining several locally trained models, federated learning has excellent potential to train NILM models locally without communicating sensitive data with cloud servers. Thus, the second part of the current paper provides a summary of recent federated NILM frameworks with a focus on the main contributions of each framework and the achieved performance. Furthermore, we identify the non-availability of proper toolkits enabling easy experimentation with federated neural NILM as a primary barrier in the field. Thus, we extend existing toolkits with a federated component, made publicly available and conduct experiments on the REFIT energy dataset considering four different scenarios.

Abstract The application of Deep Learning methodologies to Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) gave rise to a new family of Neural NILM approaches which increasingly outperform traditional NILM approaches. In this extended abstract describing our ongoing research, we analyze recent Neural NILM approaches and our findings imply that these approaches have difficulties in generating valid, reasonably-shaped appliance load profiles. We propose to enhance Neural NILM approaches with appliance load sequence generators trained with a Generative Adversarial Network to mitigate the described problem. The preliminary results of our experiments with Generative Adversarial Networks show the potential of the approach, albeit there is no strong evidence yet that this approach outperforms the examined end-to-end-trained Neural NILM approaches. In the progress of our investigations, we generalize energy-based NILM performance metrics and establish the complete classification confusion matrix based on the estimated energy in appliance load profiles. This enables the adaption of all known classification scores to their energy-based counterparts.