Introduction

Smart meters are used to measure electricity consumption, but building machine learning

models requires large amounts of high-quality data. To address this problem, a novel data

generation framework, Federated-WDCGAN, is proposed which combines GAN and federated

learning. It is evaluated through analysis of generated data and its use in a machine learning task

for household characteristic classification.

Federated-WDCGAN is a novel data generation framework that combines GAN and

federated learning to generate realistic energy consumption data with privacy guarantee. It is

evaluated through analysis of generated data and its use in a machine learning task for household

characteristic classification. The paper is structured to review related work, introduce data,

outline proposed model, describe experimental settings, present experiments, and results, and

suggest future work.

Research Gap/Questions

 Sharing data beyond its control is prohibited for reasons of data privacy, data ownership,

business competition, and legal issues. This leads to the so-called ‘‘data silo’’ problem. It is

also a waste and limits the research and applications that require such data sets.

 Most of the current data-driven data generation models are trained from a single data source,

resulting in the use of synthetic data for training machine learning models that may result in

low generality or bias.

 More research is needed to develop advanced data synthesis models that can generate

synthetic data from multiple data sources.

Related Work

In this section, we review traditional methods to generate energy consumption data,

introduce the structure and applications of GANs and FL, and describe sociodemographic

identification tasks related to model evaluation.

2.1. Energy consumption data generation

Energy consumption data generation has received considerable attention in the past, with

two broad categories: mathematical modeling methods and data-driven methods. Simulation

methods are the most widely used but require complex mathematical modeling knowledge and

the generated load data is generally less accurate. Data-driven methods typically require some

real data samples to serve as a seed or training set for the model. To address this limitation, we

propose a novel data generation framework that utilizes federated learning to incorporate

multiple data sources into the training process. This approach has the potential to generate more

accurate and generalizable results compared to approaches that rely on a single data source.

2.2. Generative adversarial networks

GAN have attracted significant attention from the research community, leading to two

main research directions: theory-oriented research and application-oriented research. Theory-

oriented research focuses on addressing challenges such as gradient vanishing, training

instability, mode collapse, poor diversity, and evaluation metrics. Application-oriented research

focuses on applications in computer vision, natural language processing, medical image analysis,

and smart grid. GAN has been used for tasks such as image generation, text generation,

translation, data augmentation, domain adaptation, and image synthesis.

2.3. Federated learning

Federated learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning approach that allows the

training of machine learning models on edge devices while protecting data privacy. It was first

introduced by Google in 2017 and has been applied in a variety of fields, such as finance,

security, healthcare, and online recommendation systems. In the smart grid sector, FL models can

provide benefits such as improved efficiency, optimized grid operation, increased understanding

of the grid, and reduced privacy risks. This research proposes a novel approach for addressing

data-silo problems by using integrated GAN with the FL computing framework to generate

synthetic data.

2.4. Studies on load profiles and sociodemographic information

Sociodemographic factors, such as employment status, income, family size and

composition, and the presence of certain appliances, can significantly influence household

energy consumption. Previous research has shown that an increase in the number of occupants

can lead to higher electricity consumption and that age is a significant factor in electricity

consumption patterns. Additionally, sociodemographic characteristics such as appliances and

indoor activities can be inferred from energy consumption data. This study examines the use of

federated data generation as a privacy-preserving approach for analyzing data from energy

consumption.

Conclusion

This paper presents the Federated-WDCGAN model, a novel data generation model that

combines federated learning with an enhanced generative adversarial network to generate

realistic energy consumption data while preserving privacy. Evaluations have shown that the

model can generate high-quality data comparable to real data in terms of statistics, patterns, and

classification performance. It has been tested in a variety of machine learning tasks and has been

able to effectively preserve the privacy of sensitive energy consumption data while generating

realistic synthetic data. Future work on the model includes further refinement, comparison of

training time and performance with other federated learning models, alternative methods for

evaluating the quality of synthetic data, exploration of potential applications of the model in

other domains and combining the model with other data generation methods.