GlobalSIP 2015 -- Symposium on Signal Processing Applications in Smart Buildings
A NEW APPROACH FOR SUPERVISED POWER DISAGGREGATION BY USING A DEEP
RECURRENT LSTM NETWORK
Lukas Mauch and Bin Yang
Institute of Signal Processing and System Theory, University of Stuttgart, Germany
ABSTRACT
This paper presents a new approach for supervised power dis-
aggregation by using a deep recurrent long short term memory
network. It is useful to extract the power signal of one dom-
inant appliance or any subcircuit from the aggregate power
signal. To train the network, a measurement of the power sig-
nal of the target appliance in addition to the total power signal
during the same time period is required. The method is super-
vised, but less restrictive in practice since submetering of an
important appliance or a subcircuit for a short time is feasi-
ble. The main advantages of this approach are: a) It is also
applicable to variable load and not restricted to on-off and
multi-state appliances. b) It does not require hand-engineered
event detection and feature extraction. c) By using multiple
networks, it is possible to disaggregate multiple appliances or
subcircuits at the same time. d) It also works with a low cost
power meter as shown in the experiments with the Reference
Energy Disaggregation (REDD) dataset (1/3Hz sampling fre-
quency, only real power).
Index Terms— Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM),
supervised power disaggregation, deep recurrent neural net-
work (RNN), long-short term memory (LSTM)
1. INTRODUCTION
Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is a cost-effective en-
ergy monitoring technique to infer the electrical power con-
sumption of individual appliances from the total power mea-
surement of a single or a few power meters [1]. It can be
supervised or unsupervised and event-based or eventless [2,
3, 4]. Though there is no system yet today solving the NILM
problem with high accuracy for challenging applications like
large buildings, two approaches seem to be favored.
One approach is event-based and uses a combination of
unsupervised and supervised techniques. Unsupervised al-
gorithms are first used to detect and cluster state transitions
called events in the aggregate power signal [1, 2, 4]. A state
of the art event detection algorithm can achieve a true posi-
tive rate of 98.5% and 70.5% and false positive percentage
of 0.55% and 8.75% for the phase A and B of the Building-
Level fUlly-labeled dataset for Electricity Disaggregation
(BLUED), respectively [5]. Then supervised classifiers are
978-1-4799-7591-4/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE
used to assign known appliances to detected events in order
to estimate the power trace and energy consumption of indi-
vidual appliances [6, 7]. But many event-based algorithms
need a high sampling frequency to extract rich features (P,
Q, harmonics, transients) for a reliable event detection and
classification. A second difficulty is its restriction to on-off
and multi-state appliances. Variable load appliance is still
an open issue. A third difficulty is the collection of training
data (appliance library) to train the classifier and, more seri-
ously, the transfer of the trained NILM system from a known
building to a new one containing possibly new appliances.
The second approach considers the disaggregation as an
optimization problem and seeks a combination of appliances
whose resulting aggregate signal is close to the total power
measurement. Hidden Markov models and various extensions
are proposed to examine different combinations of state se-
quences of appliances [8, 9, 10]. By definition, this approach
is also limited to discrete-state appliances only. Another chal-
lenge is the exponentially increasing number of combinations
of state sequences for an increasing number of appliances. A
third limitation is that this approach fails in the presence of
unknown appliances.
This paper proposes a new approach for supervised power
disaggregation. The intention in this paper is not to disaggre-
gate all appliances; this is almost impossible in a large build-
ing with several hundred or thousand appliances whose power
consumption ranges from W (LED light) to kW. Our main
purpose is to monitor the power consumption of the major
loads in a building for power saving. We propose to use a
deep recurrent neural network (RNN) based on the long short
term memory (LSTM) architecture. The task of the network
is to extract the target power signal of the appliance or subcir-
cuit from the aggregate power signal based on the long mem-
ory of the network after a supervised training of the network.
In this case, the aggregate power signal can contain, in addi-
tion to the target power signal, any other known or unknown
appliances.
The paper is organized as follows. In section 2, the archi-
tecture and learning of the deep recurrent LSTM network are
briefly described. Section 3 explains how to use the network
for supervised power disaggregation. Section 4 shows some
preliminary results for the REDD dataset [11].
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 GlobalSIP 2015 -- Symposium on Signal Processing Applications in Smart Buildings

x(n) suffer from the vanishing gradient problem [15] and, there-
fore, can learn mappings with long time dependencies [16].
The mapping rule of the recurrent layer l at time n is defined
Input Layer N (0) units by
x(0) (n) i(l) (n) = σ(W(l) (n) + W(l)
hi x (n − 1)
(l−1) (l)
xi x

LSTM layer 1 N (1) units, θ(1) + W(l) (l) (l)

si s (n − 1) + bi ) (2)
f (n) =
(l)
σ(W(l) xfx
(l−1)
(n) + W(l) (l)
h f x (n − 1)
+ W(l)
s f s (n − 1) + b f )
(l) (l)
(3)
LSTM layer L N (L) units, θ(L)
s (n) =
(l)
i (n) ◦
(l)
tanh(W(l)
xs x
(l−1)
(n) + W(l) (l)
hs x (n − 1) + b(l)
s )
x(L) (n)
+ f (l) (n) ◦ s (n − 1)
(l)
(4)
Output layer N (L+1) units, θ(L+1)
o (n) =
(l)
σ(W(l) xo x
(l−1)
(n) + W(l) (l)
ho x (n − 1)
y(n)
+ W so sn + bo )
(l) (l) (l)
(5)
Fig. 1. Deep recurrent neural network x (n) =
(l)
o (n) ◦ tanh(s (n)),
(l) (l)
(6)

where a ◦ b denotes the elementwise product of two vectors.

2. DEEP RECURRENT LSTM NETWORK
A conventional feedforward neural network (NN) with enough
hidden layers and units is known as a universal mapper. It
is able to approximate any static mapping from certain input
to output. A RNN with feedback in time is suitable to learn
any dynamic (time-varying) mapping from input to output
[12, 13]. Hence RNN suits better for power disaggregation
than NN because in NILM applications, the power signal
of almost all appliances is not deterministic due to random
switch-on/off and the aggregate power signal is dynamic due
to a time-varying superposition of power signals of different
appliances. We use the more complex LSTM unit in RNN
because it has a longer memory and avoids the vanishing
gradient problem [14].
2.1. Network architecture
Fig. 1 illustrates the architecture of the used deep re-
current LSTM network. The input sequence to the net-
work is a scalar sequence x(n) ∈ R which could be the
aggregate real power signal at time n ∈ Z. The input
layer of N (0) input units just forms a sequence of vectors
(0)
x(0) (n) = [x(n), x(n − 1), . . . , x(n − N (0) + 1)]T ∈ RN for the
next L recurrent layers. Each recurrent layer l consists of
(l−1)
N (l) units and maps its input sequence x(l−1) (n) ∈ RN to an
N (l)
output sequence x (n) ∈ R , 1 ≤ l ≤ L. The last recurrent
(l)
s(l) (n) is the state vector containing the memory stored in the
layer l at time n. At each time step, the multiplicative input
gate i(l) (n) and the forgetting gate f (l) (n) determine whether
the memory content is updated with new data (i(l) (n)  0),
fed back (f (l) (n)  0) or erased (f (l) (n) = 0). The initializa-
tion of the state is s(l) (0) = 0. The output x(l) (n) of layer l is
controlled by the multiplicative output gate o(l) (n) which de-
termines whether the memory content is released (o(l) (n)  0)
or not (o(l) (n) = 0). The activation of all gates is a nonlinear
function σ(·) of the linear combination of the current input of
the previous layer, the memory content and the output of the
current layer at the previous time step. It is assumed that the
gate signals are only affected by the memory content of the
same LSTM unit. Therefore, all matrices W(l) s∗ are diagonal.
Clearly, the output y(n) of such a network is a causal, non-
linear and time-varying function of x(1), . . . , x(n)
y(n) = f (x(1), . . . , x(n), n, θ) (7)
The set of all parameters in the network is summarized in
one vector θ = [θ(1)T , θ(2)T , . . . , θ(L)T , θ(L+1)T ]T and has to be
determined during training. Here, θ(l) (1 ≤ l ≤ L) is the pa-
rameter vector of the LSTM layer l and contains all elements
of the weight matrices W(l) (l)
∗∗ and bias vectors b∗ . θ
(L+1)
is the
corresponding parameter vector of the output layer.

layer L is followed by a feedforward output layer consisting 2.2. Forward-backward learning

of N (L+1) units. It performs a static nonlinear mapping at each
time instant n
y(n) = σ(L+1) (W(L+1) x(L) (n) + b(L+1) ) ∈ RN
(L+1)
, (1)
where σ(L+1) (·) is an elementwise nonlinear activation func-
tion in the output layer.
As introduced in [14], LSTM units are commonly used
as building blocks of the recurrent layers because they do not
In Fig. 1, the input sequence x(n) is processed feedforward
in time, resulting in a causal input-output mapping. In our
study, we found out that a noncausal RNN can perform a
better power disaggregation, i.e. each output y(n) depends
on the current, past and future samples of x(n). For this
purpose, we adopt the forward-backward learning from [17].
The input sequence x(n) is divided into a number of non-
overlapping blocks. A bidirectional RNN processes each

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 GlobalSIP 2015 -- Symposium on Signal Processing Applications in Smart Buildings
block of B samples, say x = [x(1), . . . , x(B)]T , and returns
a block of output samples y(1), . . . y(B). Each layer l of
the bidirectional RNN has a double width 2N (l) . One half
of its layer processes the input sequence in the forward di-
rection x(l−1) (1), . . . , x(l−1) (B), resulting in x(l) (l)
f (1), . . . , x f (B),
and the other half does the same in the backward direction
on the reversed input sequence x(l−1) (B), . . . , x(l−1) (1), result-
ing in x(l) (l)
b (B), . . . , xb (1). The input for the next layer l + 1
is a sequence x (1), . . . , x(l) (B) with concatenated results
(l)
2N (l)
x(l) (n) = [x(l)T (l)T
f (n), xb (n)] ∈ R
T
. Therefore, the output
y(n) of the network depends on the complete input block
x(1), . . . , x(B) for any time 1 ≤ n ≤ B.
2.3. Training of the network
The parameter vector θ = [θTf , θTb ]T of the bidirectional RNN
is determined using a supervised training. For a given set of
M pairs of input blocks xm = [xm (1), . . . xm (B)]T and desired
output blocks tm (1), . . . , tm (B), 1 ≤ m ≤ M, the network is
trained by a least squares learning θ̂ = arg minθ J(θ) with

M 
B metered signals of house 1 are divided into a training set con-
J(θ) = ||ym (n) − tm (n))||2 + λ1 ||θW ||1 + λ2 ||θW ||22 . (8)
m=1 n=1
To avoid overfitting, l1 - and l2 -penalties on all weight matrices
are used for regularization. The vector θW contains all weight
matrices W(l)
∗∗ in all layers. || · ||1 and || · ||2 denote the l1 and l2
norm, respectively. The regularization parameters λ1 and λ2
have to be chosen carefully and can be obtained by minimiz-
ing J(θ) over a validation set using grid search. The gradient
of J(θ) with respect to θ is calculated using backpropagation
through time (BPTT) without gradient truncation. The min-
imization is done by using stochastic gradient descent [18].
The network is trained end-to-end. According to [19], a mo-
mentum of μ = 0.5 is used to adjust the learning rate during
training. Momentum increases the learning rate in gradient
directions where the cost function has low curvature. Fur-
thermore, an exponentially decaying learning rate schedule is
used which ensures stable minimization [20] without oscilla-
tion near local minima. According to [21], the initial weights
are drawn from a uniform distribution.
3. APPLICATION TO POWER DISAGGREGATION
Let sk (n) be the submetered real power consumed by appli-
K
ance k at time n and x(n) = k=1 sk (n) be the aggregate power
signal from K appliances, respectively. Both signals are nor-
malized to have unit variance. For a selected target appli-
ance st (n) among these K devices, we train one RNN to per-
form time series regression on the aggregate signal and get
an estimate ŝt (n) for st (n). Hence the output layer has only
N (L+1) = 1 unit. The aggregate signal is divided into M
non-overlapping blocks of length B: xm = [x((m − 1)B +
1), . . . , x(mB)]T , (1 ≤ m ≤ M), which are processed indepen-
dently by the RNN. The target blocks are extracted from the
65
submetered signal st (n) in a similar way: tm = [st ((m − 1)B +
1), . . . , st (mB)]T . Because real power is always non-negative,
a softplus activation function σ(L+1) (x) = ln(1 + exp(x)) is
chosen for the output layer. For all recurrent layers, a sigmoid
activation σ(l) (x) = 1/(1 + exp (−x)) is used.
4. EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS
The network is implemented in Python using Theano [22].
All experiments are done with the REDD. It contains real
power measurements for six houses (no reactive power). In
each house, two aggregate signals of phase A and B with a
sampling frequency F s = 1Hz and submetered power sig-
nals of individual appliances with a sampling frequency F s =
1/3Hz are recorded. In our study, house 1 (18 appliances, 620
hours) and house 2 (9 appliances, 258 hours) are used.
Because of different sampling frequencies in aggregate
and submetered signals, we performed our tests on synthetic
aggregate signals by summing up all submetered signals sk (n)
in each house. For training and test, both aggregate and sub-
taining the first 2/3 part and a test set containing the last 1/3
part. House 2 is only used as test data to see whether a net-
work trained by house 1 is able to disaggregate a similar ap-
pliance in house 2.
Three different networks are trained to disaggregate the
fridge (FR), dishwasher (DW) and microwave (MW) in house
1. The fridge has a quite periodic power consumption,
whereas the other two devices show random events. The
dishwasher is a multistate device, whereas the microwave
and fridge are on-off appliances. Unfortunately, there are no
variable load devices in the REDD dataset.
In our experiments, each network consists of L = 2 recur-
rent layers with N (1) = N (2) = 140 units. The input layer has a
width of N (0) = 10. So the parameter vector θ has 485801 el-
ements to be learned. The block length is chosen as B = 5000
corresponding to 4.17 hours of data. Each network is trained
for a maximum number of 100 epochs. Training is stopped
early if the validation error does not further decrease.
Fig. 2 shows the aggregate signal x(n), submetered refer-
ence signal st (n), and disaggregated signal ŝt (n) for roughly
30 hours of the test set for dishwasher and fridge in house
1. The target power signal can be estimated quite accurately
from the aggregate signal. Errors occur at discontinuities (e.g.
switch-on/off) because the network seems to have a lowpass
characteristic.
Table 1 and 2 give some performance metrics for a
quantitative analysis of the disaggregation. We use Et =
1 N
n=1 st (n) in kWh to calculate the true energy consump-
Fs
N
tion of the target appliance. Similarly, Êt = F1s n=1 ŝt (n)

and E = F1s n=1 N
x(n) denote the estimated energy consump-
tion of the target applianceand the total energy consumption
N
n=1 ( ŝt (n)−st (n))
2
of the house. NRMS = N 2 is the normalized
n=1 st (n)
 GlobalSIP 2015 -- Symposium on Signal Processing Applications in Smart Buildings

real power [W] aggregate

2000

0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30
time [h]
refrigerator (FR) dishwasher (DW)
500 1500
400
real power [W]

real power [W]

1000
300
200
500
100
0 0
0 5 10 15 20 25 0 5 10 15 20 25
Fig. 2. Disaggregation
time [h] of the fridge and the dishwasher (red: reference, blue: disaggregated)
time [h]

Appl. Et Êt NRMS F1 R P peatedly, starting from different random initializations. Each
FR 23.9 23.0 0.33 0.91 0.98 0.85 network is only trained for 10 epochs with fixed regularization
DW 11.1 10.50 0.35 0.79 0.87 0.73 parameters to reduce the computational complexity. Consid-
MW 7.8 7.9 0.74 0.66 0.83 0.54 ering the models obtained from all random inizializations, the
Table 1. Validation on test set of house 1 with E = 63.37kWh median NRMS together with its interquartile range (IQR) for
the training and test set is shown in Fig. 3. The training error
Appl. Et Êt NRMS F1 R P decreases with an increasing layer width. However, for large
FR 20.7 20.6 0.35 0.93 0.96 0.91 layers the network tends to overfitt to the training data. The
DW 2.36 3.26 0.31 0.68 1.0 0.52 optimal layer width seems to be around 140 units.
MW 4.0 2.11 0.58 0.09 0.05 0.5
Table 2. Validation on house 2 with E = 36.6kWh 0.42 test set

training set
0.40

RMSE of the disaggregation. We also examine how well the 0.38

active periods of the target appliance are estimated from the 0.36
NRMS

aggregate signal using the F1 score, precision P and recall 0.34

R. The active periods in st (n) and ŝt (n) are detected by sim-
ple thresholding st (n) ≥ γ, ŝt (n) ≥ γ, where γ = 30W is
0.32

chosen. We see that the time intevals of the active periods 0.30

of all three target appliances are estimated quite accurately, 0.28

while the estimation of the power values is less accurate. A 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160

layer size in units

good news is that the networks show a good generalization
capability for the fridge and dishwasher. Trained by house
1, the networks are able to disaggregate similar appliances in
house 2. The reason for the much smaller value of Êt and F1
score for the microwave in house 2 is that house 2 seems to
have a microwave-barbecue combination in contrast to house
1. The microwave network trained by house 1 is only able
to reconstruct the active phases of the microwave, but not
those of barbecue in house 2. The barbecue less power (about
45W), but is active for longer periods than the microwave.
Because those periods can not be captured by the network,
the recall and F1 score are very small. By using γ = 50W
for the thresholding of active periods, i.e. considering the
barbecue periods as inactive, the metrics become F1 = 0.59,
p = 0.59 and r = 0.59 which are comparable to the results of
house 1.
To investigate the influence of the layer width, different
RNN with 20 to 160 recurrent units per layer are trained re-
Fig. 3. Influence of the layer size for disaggregation of the
refrigerator from house 1
5. CONCLUSIONS
This paper demonstrates the feasibility of a deep recurrent
LSTM network for an eventless power disaggregation in
NILM applications. It is able to estimate the power signal of
a target appliance or any subcircuit from the aggregate signal
after a supervised training of the network by using a submeter
measurement of the target appliance. The results achieved
for the low frequency (1/3Hz) REDD dataset containing only
real power measurements are promising and shows a new way
to design NILM systems. By using multiple networks, any
number of appliances or subcircuits can be extracted from the
aggregate signal.

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 GlobalSIP 2015 -- Symposium on Signal Processing Applications in Smart Buildings
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