Towards Sustainable Deep Learning for Multi-Label Classification on NILM

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is the process of obtaining appliance-level data from a single metering point, measuring total electricity consumption of a household or a business. Appliance-level data can be directly used for demand response applications and energy management systems as well as for awareness raising and motivation for improvements in energy efficiency and reduction in the carbon footprint. Recently, classical machine learning and deep learning (DL) techniques became very popular and proved as highly effective for NILM classification, but with the growing complexity these methods are faced with significant computational and energy demands during both their training and operation. In this paper, we introduce a novel DL model aimed at enhanced multi-label classification of NILM with improved computation and energy efficiency. We also propose a testing methodology for comparison of different models using data synthesized from the measurement datasets so as to better represent real-world scenarios. Compared to the state-of-the-art, the proposed model has its carbon footprint reduced by more than 23% while providing on average approximately 8 percentage points in performance improvement when testing on data derived from REFIT and UK-DALE datasets.