Context Aware Energy Disaggregation Using Adaptive Bidirectional LSTM Models

Energy disaggregation, or Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM), describes various processes aiming to identify the individual contribution of appliances, given the aggregate power signal. In this paper, a non-causal adaptive context-aware bidirectional deep learning model for energy disaggregation is introduced. The proposed model, CoBiLSTM, harnesses the representational power of deep recurrent Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks, while fitting two basic properties of NILM problem which state of the art methods do not appropriately account for: non-causality and adaptivity to contextual factors (e.g., seasonality). A Bayesian-optimized framework is introduced to select the best configuration of the proposed regression model, driven by a self-training adaptive mechanism. Furthermore, the proposed model is structured in a modular way to address multi-dimensionality issues that arise when the number of appliances increases. Experimental results indicate the proposed method's superiority compared to the current state of the art.