Generative Adversarial Networks and Transfer Learning for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring in Smart Grids

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) objective is to disaggregate the total power consumption of a building into individual appliance-level profiles. This gives insights to consumers to efficiently use energy and realizes smart grid efficiency outcomes. While many studies focus on achieving accurate models, few of them address the models generalizability. This paper proposes two approaches based on generative adversarial networks to achieve high-accuracy load disaggregation. Concurrently, the paper addresses the model generalizability in two ways, the first is by transfer learning by parameter sharing and the other is by learning compact common representations between source and target domains. This paper also quantitatively evaluate the worth of these transfer learning approaches based on the similarity between the source and target domains. The models are evaluated on three open-access datasets and outperformed recent machine-learning methods.