Sequence-to-Point Learning Based on Temporal Convolutional Networks for Nonintrusive Load Monitoring

Nonintrusive load monitoring (NILM) is performed by monitoring the total electricity consumption data from the customer’s meter and decomposing it with a load decomposition algorithm to get real-time electricity consumption data for individual appliances. Nonintrusive load decomposition is a single-channel blind source separation problem, which is difficult to implement because of the inherently unidentifiable problem. Recent studies have shown that deep learning is gradually becoming the mainstream approach to solve the NILM problem owing to the availability of data, computing power, and deep network training algorithm models. Among them, the sequence-to-point (seq2point) (Zhang) load decomposition model achieves state-of-the-art prediction because it concentrates on the representation ability of the network at one point. In this article, we optimize the structure of the network model based on the seq2point model, use a temporal convolutional network (TCN) with a more flexible perceptual field of view to train the load decomposition model, and replace the traditional activation function Relu with the activation function GELU. Finally, we test the algorithm in the public dataset UK-DALE and select the mean absolute error and F-score as the main evaluation indexes of the algorithm performance. Comparing the decomposition results of the two algorithms for the same period dataset, the results show that the temporal convolutional network model has substantially improved the performance index of load decomposition while reducing the model parameters.