New time-frequency transient features for nonintrusive load monitoring

Abstract

A crucial step in nonintrusive load monitoring (NILM) is feature extraction, which consists of signal processing techniques to extract features from voltage and current signals. This paper presents a new time-frequency feature based on Stockwell transform. The extracted features aim to describe the shape of the current transient signal by applying an energy measure on the fundamental and the harmonic frequency voices. In order to validate the proposed methodology, classical machine learning tools are applied (k-NN and decision tree classifiers) on two existing datasets (Controlled On/Off Loads Library (COOLL) and Home Equipment Laboratory Dataset (HELD1)). The classification rates achieved are clearly higher than that for other related studies in the literature, with 99.52% and 96.92% classification rates for the COOLL and HELD1 datasets, respectively.