dsCleaner: A python library to clean, preprocess and convert non-instrusive load monitoring datasets

Abstract

Datasets play a vital role in data science and machine learning research as they serve as the basis for the development, evaluation, and benchmark of new algorithms. Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring is one of the fields that has been benefiting from the recent increase in the number of publicly available datasets. However, there is a lack of consensus concerning how dataset should be made available to the community, thus resulting in considerable structural differences between the publicly available datasets. This technical note presents the DSCleaner, a Python library to clean, preprocess, and convert time series datasets to a standard file format. Two application examples using real-world datasets are also presented to show the technical validity of the proposed library.