Perfednilm: a practical personalized federated learning-based non-intrusive load monitoring

Abstract Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is a valuable technique for breaking down overall power consumption into the energy usage of individual appliances. Understanding power usage patterns through NILM plays an important role in reducing energy costs and achieving carbon reduction goals. However, privacy concerns often deter consumers from sharing their electricity consumption data. To address these privacy concerns, Federated Learning (FL) has been introduced in NILM, which enables the training of NILM models while keeping power consumers’ data locally. However, FL’s reliance on a single global model leads to poor performance on clients with unique power consumption patterns. In response to this challenge, we present a Personalized Federated Learning NILM algorithm (PerFedNILM), a practical personalized FL approach for NILM. PerFedNILM limits the local update bias across clients and trains personalized models for individual clients to improve load-monitoring performance. In addition, it mitigates the negative impact of client dropout, which is a common issue in practice. Our experiments on using real-world energy data demonstrate that PerFedNILM outperforms previous FL-based NILM methods, especially in client dropout scenarios.