Virtual Metering

Abstract

The scarcity of potable water is a critical challenge in many regions around the world. Previous studies have shown that knowledge of device-level water usage can lead to significant conservation. Although there is considerable interest in determining discriminative features via sparse coding for water disaggregation to separate whole-house consumption into its component appliances, existing methods lack a mechanism for fitting coefficient distributions and are thus unable to accurately discriminate parallel devices’ consumption. This article proposes a Bayesian discriminative sparse coding model, referred to as Virtual Metering (VM), for this disaggregation task. Mixture-of-Gammas is employed for the prior distribution of coefficients, contributing two benefits: (i) guaranteeing the coefficients’ sparseness and non-negativity, and (ii) capturing the distribution of active coefficients. The resulting method effectively adapts the bases to aggregated consumption to facilitate discriminative learning in the proposed model, and devices’ shape features are formalized and incorporated into Bayesian sparse coding to direct the learning of basis functions. Compact Gibbs Sampling (CGS) is developed to accelerate the inference process by utilizing the sparse structure of coefficients. The empirical results obtained from applying the new model to large-scale real and synthetic datasets revealed that VM significantly outperformed the benchmark methods.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jan 30, 2018
Source ID
10.1145/3141770

Entities

People

  • Arnold P. Boedihardjo
  • Bingsheng Wang
  • Chang-tien Lu
  • Zhiqian Chen

Organizations

  • Army Research Office
  • Google
  • United States Army Corps of Engineers
  • Virginia Tech

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.
  • Regression Analysis.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Bayesian Inference