Revealing Household Characteristics from Electricity Meter Data with Grade Analysis and Machine Learning Algorithms

In this article, the Grade Correspondence Analysis (GCA) with posterior clustering and visualization is introduced and applied to extract important features to reveal households’ characteristics based on electricity usage data. The main goal of the analysis is to automatically extract, in a non-intrusive way, number of socio-economic household properties including family type, age of inhabitants, employment type, house type, and number of bedrooms. The knowledge of specific properties enables energy utilities to develop targeted energy conservation tariffs and to assure balanced operation management. In particular, classification of the households based on the electricity usage delivers value added information to allow accurate demand planning with the goal to enhance the overall efficiency of the network. The approach was evaluated by analyzing smart meter data collected from 4182 households in Ireland over a period of 1.5 years. The analysis outcome shows that revealing characteristics from smart meter data is feasible, and the proposed machine learning methods were yielding for an accuracy of approx. 90% and Area Under Receiver Operating Curve (AUC) of 0.82.