Enhancing NILM classification via robust principal component analysis dimension reduction

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) techniques estimate the consumption of individual appliances in a household or facility, based on aggregated reading from a centralized meter. Usually, NILM techniques are shown to be improved when various power features and additional power quality parameters are included. However, adding power features leads to increased time complexity which is a disadvantage to real-time operation. Previous attempt to operate a principal component analysis (PCA) method to reduce the dimension of the problem managed to improve the run time but with considerably low accuracy. To this end, we utilize a robust PCA approach, to mitigate the influence of outliers in the data as a measure for improved performance. The proposed procedure achieves extraordinary results with accuracy over 96% for 600 hours long record of power quality measurements of the consumption of seven appliances from the standard AMPds dataset.