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Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter

Data Analytics - A Review
Elham Eskandarnia, Hesham Al-Ammal, Riadh Ksantini
and Mustafa Hammad
Department of the Computer Science, University of Bahrain,
P.o.Box 32038, Bahrain.
*Corresponding author(s). E-mail(s): e.eskandar@bub.bh;
Abstract
The field of smart meter data analytics is a relatively young field
that recently grew due to the wealth of data generated from smart
meters. Recent progress in high-performance computing made it possi-
ble to efficiently use deep neural networks to extract more actionable
knowledge and patterns from massive data collected within the smart
grid. Examining the available literature, there is a need for a compre-
hensive survey that covers all aspects of smart meter data analytics.
This review paper provides a broad overview of the current research
spectrum within smart meter analysis, while identifying future chal-
lenges for smart meter data analytic through a detailed taxonomy. The
proposed taxonomy identifies the main domains within the field, as
well as the various functions that are conducted within each domain.
To show the strength of deep learning techniques in smart meter
analytics, and experiment is conducted comparing various classical
load profiling techniques with deep clustering. The results of the
experiment conducted on an open large dataset show the perfor-
mance of deep clustering to be better than classical techniques.
Furthermore, the review is performed from the perspective of data
science; emphasizing the data tasks such as data reprocessing, ana-
lytic algorithms, and evaluation methods for each domain. Further-
more, the paper discusses deep neural network techniques used for
each domain of smart meter analysis and identifies gaps within each
domain, including obstacles and potential opportunities for research.
Keywords: Big data, Deep Learning, Smart Grid , Machine Learning ,

Smart Meter Analytics
1
2 Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter Data
1 Introduction
The economy of the 21st century grows increasingly dependent on sustainable
use of energy. The smart grid is the first building block for responsible energy
use in the modern society. Power management, forecasting, planning, and many
other functions can only be implemented through the efficient use of the smart
grid and its main component the smart meter.
However, the large volume of raw data generated by smart meters needs to
be stored, cleaned and analysed, to discover commercially usable knowledge
and gain insight. This wealth of information can be utilized by individuals,
the energy industry, service providers, as well as regulators and planners. The
techniques used for data-driven analysis of this data vary. Machine learning
techniques, among other techniques, are widely implemented for this task.
However, high-performance computing made recent advanced techniques such
as deep and reinforcement learning more accessible for many of the data-driven
analysis tasks within the smart grid.
This review paper aims to survey the various deep neural networks architec-
tures and techniques used for smart meter analysis by enumerating the current
research trends as well as provides a better understanding of the available
opportunities for researchers.
The paper first presents an overview of smart meter intelligence plus a
taxonomy of smart meter analytics based on [1] to aid researchers in navigating
the multitude of domains, algorithms, and methods available within the field.
This taxonomy will be the basis of the review of the field of smart meter deep
learning research. Thus, based on a review of the literature, deep learning
techniques used within each domain will be discussed while highlighting the
network architectures selected due to the nature of each task. The last section
of the paper outlines various open research problems as well as challenges and
opportunities available for researchers in the field of deep learning for smart
meter analytics.
1.1 Smart Meter Intelligence

Smart meters record the power used by consumers periodically and transmit
it to the data collector through a Local Area Network (LAN). The collector
retrieves the data and transmits it to the utility’s central collection points. This
data must then be processed and useful information and knowledge extracted
from it that leads to actions or stored for future analysis. This wealth of infor-
mation can be utilized by individuals, the energy industry, service providers,
as well as regulators, and planners.
The data science workflow outlined in Figure 1 shows the main steps in
smart meter data analytics:
1. Data acquisition: Smart meters generate data and communicate it to storage
areas through LANs and WANs. Other related data might also be stored
(e.g. weather data, national holidays, etc.)
Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter Data 3
Fig. 1 An overview of the smart meter intelligence workflow
2. Pre-Processing and Exploration: The data is pre-processed through data

wrangling and munging techniques. This includes dealing with missing data
and detecting plus filtering anomalies. The data must be transformed to a
format that can be processed by the machine learning model.
3. Model-Building: Suitable models are selected and trained on the pre-
processed data.
4. Evaluation: The model is evaluated based on some ground truth that is
established by the data scientist.
5. Visualize/Operationalize: The final step is performed once good perfor-
mance is established by the model-building step. It includes visualizing and
presenting the results to the stakeholders, and operationalizing the process
for future data.
Although the pre-processing and exploration step seems to be straightfor-
ward, due to the huge amount of smart meter data it is a non-trivial step and
requires careful and time-intensive work by the data scientist. This step often
includes big-data tools such as Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, etc. to manage the large
amounts of data. The significant potential of the massive amounts of data col-
lected by smart meters is heavily dependent on the capacity to store, manage,
analyse and extract valuable information from this data.
Although machine learning has been used in the past for load analysis,
advances in high performance computing made it possible to widely use deep
learning and other advanced techniques for smart meter analysis.
The deep learning methods have many advantages in dealing with the high
dimensional data and time-series, and extract more actionable knowledge and
patterns from the massive amounts of data collected by smart meters. On the
other hand, deep learning has the ability to extract important features for
subsequent analysis tasks. Hence, another advantage of using deep learning is
in reducing the pre-processing task by eliminating any feature extraction stage.
Typical architecture designs of deep learning include Convolutions Neural

Networks (CNN), Deep Sparse Autoencoder (DSA), Recurrent Neural Net-
works (RNN), Multi-Layer Perceptions (MLP), Deep Restricted Boltzmann
Machines (DRBM), etc. [2]. In the following section, the opportunities and gaps
related to these relatively new methods will be discussed in various domains
of smart meter analytics. But first taxonomy of smart meter analytics will be
presented in order to frame these deep learning techniques.
1.2 A Taxonomy of Smart Meter Analytics

Smart meter analytics produces actionable knowledge and the type of knowl-
edge that can be extracted from smart meter data varies based on the task
and the results extracted from the raw data. Although many reviews of smart
meter analytics have been published, the wide range of knowledge that may be
retrieved from smart meters is seldom examined as a whole and thus a simple
yet general and field-encompassing taxonomy was proposed in [1].
Prior to this unifying taxonomy review papers mainly focused on a specific
topic and can be categorized into two groups: reviews about special domains
of smart meter analytics [3–11], and reviews about specific techniques used
within these domain(s) [12–16]. Damminda et al. [17] considered five metering
intelligence activities: consumer profiling, segmentation and cluster analysis;
load forecasting; pricing intelligence; capturing irregularities and real-time
operation. Yildiz et al. [18] investigated the common input and output, perfor-
mance metrics, and applications for three techniques applied to smart meter
data: clustering and classification, optimization, and forecasting. Liu et al.
[19] applied performance benchmarks for smart meter offline and online tasks:
consumption histograms, thermal sensitivity, daily profile, online and offline
similarity search, and anomaly detection.
In addition, very few review articles explored novel approaches such as
deep learning for smart meter analysis [20, 21]. Recently, a taxonomy for smart
meter analysis was proposed but it did not include all tasks in knowledge
discovery or management domains [22].
To facilitate the review of the deep learning methods and the aspects of
smart meter analytics through a comprehensive framework that covers all
aspects of smart meter data, we adopt the taxonomy (Figure 2) presented
by [1], which clearly outlines the the main domains and tasks within the field.
It presents a holistic view that identifies the main domains within the field, as
well as the various functions that are conducted within each domain. The tax-
onomy was created on the basis of a set of quality attributes described in [23],
namely: orthogonality, defined based on existing literature, and based on the
terminology used in the literature and finally complete.
The whole smart meter analytics field is divided into the following three
main domains:
1. Load forecasting refers to the prediction of future electricity demand in
different horizons and scales.
2. Knowledge discovery refers to new information extracted from raw

databases of smart meter data by applying techniques such as pattern
recognition, classification, clustering, statistical analysis, etc.
3. Energy management refers to the processing of smart grid data to deploy
functions that are related to the management of grid resources, such as:
improving energy efficiency, reducing the cost of energy production and
maintaining the privacy of customers and securing the grid from cyber-
attacks.
In the following sections, we will discuss each of these domains and list recent
deep learning techniques used within the functions of each domain.
Fig. 2 A Taxonomy of Smart Meter Analytic [1]
2 Deep Learning for Smart Meter Analytics

Many of the tasks in smart meter analytics literature follow the data sci-
ence methods and rely on machine learning techniques. Deep learning models
outperform shallow machine learning models and traditional data analysis
techniques in many applications. This encouraged academics to look at deep
learning architectures that are ideal for smart meter analytics.
As Figure 3 shows, the trend of utilizing deep learning has been gain-
ing momentum in the past few years, even though it has receded in 2021. A
denotative research analysis was performed to determine the deep net archi-
tecture used in each task, while all the domains of the taxonomy (see Figure 2)
were considered during data collection. The papers were then subjected to a
comparative analysis to decide the paper that underpins each tasks (Figure 3).
Following the taxonomy presented in Figure 2, a bibliometric analysis of
around 100 articles is presented in Figure 3 which shows the number of papers
published annually in each domain. Deep learning techniques were mainly used
for the load forecasting domain and other specific tasks (i.e. load disaggregation
and fraud detection).
Fig. 3 Number of article per year based on taxonomy domain
On the other hand, Figure 4 presents the number of articles published

per year according to the deep learning technique used to tackle the analytics
problem. It demonstrates the growth in researchers’ interest in deep learning
as an approach for solving smart grid tasks. As shown, the number of papers
kept growing, and reached a peak in 2020 as new deep learning methods were
being introduced. This also demonstrates the promising results obtained by
implementing deep neural network in the field of smart meter analytics.
It is clear from the analysis that research articles started in 2016 by using
general deep neural network architectures, and then starting from 2018 specific
architectures such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and Convolutional
Neural Networks (CNN) gained more popularity. This is due to the time-
series nature of the smart meter data, as these two deep network architectures
work well for learning localized temporal data. Also, Long Short-Term Mem-
ory gained a lot of momentum since 2017, due to its effectiveness in learning
localized temporal patterns in time-series data. There was noticeable drop in
deep learning articles in 2021, which may be due to the need for more open
data and use of novel techniques.
In the following subsections, the domains of the taxonomy will be discussed
with their various tasks with special attention to the deep learning techniques
used for accomplishing each task.
Fig. 4 Number of article per year based on deep learning architecture
2.1 Smart Meter Analytics Domain: Forecasting

Today’s competitive energy market increasingly demands more accurate fore-
casts on different scales, ranging from a single smart meter (the end-user) up
to a whole grid system. An extended review of load forecasting techniques was
represented in [24]. Thus, load forecasting is considered as an essential part
of the electric industry’s planning process. Moreover, load forecasting is also
crucial for consumers in order to optimize their use of electrical energy. It can
be performed on different scale (the size of the unit that the load forecast is
carried out at) and on a certain horizon (time period of forecasting); which
can be divided into [25]:
• Short-term load forecasting (STLF): a minute or a hour or a day.
• Mid-term load forecasting (MTLF): 1 weeks to a year.
• Long-term load forecasting (LTLF): 1 to 50 years.
The output of the forecasting methods in the STLF zone is used for assess-
ing power system security, and generation scheduling. The primary aim of
MTLF is the maintenance scheduling and economic operation of power sys-
tems. While LTLF is a crucial instrument for planning and forecasting future
conditions of the electricity network and future planning.
The forecast’s scale can be divided into the following levels:
• Meter-level load forecasting[26]: This type of forecasting refers to domestic

load, user-level load, and dwelling load; and is considered as a relatively new
area. Because of the volatile nature of domestic power load profiles, fore-
casting at the meter-level is very challenging. To the best of our knowledge
only few studies were published for short-term load forecasting at the meter
level that use data granularity provided by smart meters [27–30].
• Commercial building level forecasting: There are two approaches for building
load forecasting in the literature: (i) physical models (also known as white-
box models) rely on thermodynamic rules for detailed energy modeling which
is out of scope for this paper, and (ii) data-driven energy consumption pre-
diction modeling that learns from historical data for prediction [3]. The grey
box approach was proposed by [15] for data driven and engineering methods.
• Integrated load forecasting (district, region, and country level): Three dif-
ferent approaches to aggregated load forecasting: (i) forecasting meter level
load and then adding it to find the aggregated load, (ii) adding demand to
forecast aggregate load, and (iii) clustering customers to perform forecasting
for each cluster[31].
2.1.1 Pre-Processing and Data Wrangling

Load forecasting is done based on a general data science forecasting framework
discussed in the following. Since any incorrect or inconsistent data can cause
errors in the analysis, data pre-processing is vital. Data pre-processing is a
general stage in data mining, and may include the following:
• Data cleaning is the process of detecting and correcting (completing, mod-
ifying, replacing, and/or removing) the incorrect, incomplete, inaccurate,
irrelevant or missing dat [32].
• Data integration is the process of combining multiple data sources.
• Data transformation includes normalization, smoothing, aggregation/dis-
aggregation, and/or generalization. These techniques transform the data
(e.g. wavelet transformation can decompose the original load into high and
lower frequency components). Other studies use the Fourier transform to
represent electricity loads as sinusoidal waves of different frequency and
amplitude [33, 34].
• Data reduction (feature selection) is the process of reducing the dimensional-
ity of the dataset by removing non-discriminative features. By using feature
selection methods, the forecast not only will be computationally more effi-
cient but also more accurate by enhancing the performance of the forecasting
algorithm [35–38].
2.1.2 Forecasting Algorithms

The survey in [27] and the review in [12] cover forecasting algorithms. Table 1
summarizes forecasting techniques. Many load forecasting techniques were pro-
posed in the literature, and various forecasting techniques per scale and horizon
Table 1 Publications of various load forecasting techniques against scale
Short-Term Mid-Term Long-Term
Neural Liu et. al 2017 [41] Chen et. al 2012 [42]

Networks Kong 2018 [26] Chen 2012 [43]
Time- Chaouch 2014 [44] Lee & de Oliveira

Series Eskandarnia[39] Hong 2015 [45] et. al 2018 [46]
Statistical Ghofrani 2011[47] Eskandarnia 2021[24] Hong et al. 2014 [48]

Methods Lusis 2017
Machine Lusis 2017 [49] Hu et al. 2015 [37]

Learning
Fuzzy Lee & Chen 2012 [43]

Logic Hong 2015 [45] Chen et. al 2012 [42]
AI Amjady &
Methods Keynia 2008 [50]
were categorized and presented in [24]. The following are the main methods
used for load forecasting regardless of horizon and scale:
• Statistical: These techniques can be deterministic models which express the
relationship between the load and several input factors. SARIMAX was used
for load forecasting in [39]
• Time series: This was by far the most popular method for load forecasting
before the machine learning era . However, this usually is limited to univari-
ate time series analysis which is a compromise that may lead to the loss of
important points in the data set [40].
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning: The AI techniques used in load
forecasting include artificial neural networks, deep network, fuzzy systems,
swarm intelligence, and evolutionary computation.
Among Artificial Intelligence methods, deep neural networks are consid-
ered as one of the most promising methods for short-term load forecasting
(STLF) due to two critical characteristics of deep learning: the ability to learn
extremely non-linear interactions and the ability to learn mutual ambiguity
in data sets. This fact is also reflected in Figure 3, which shows that several
papers used deep learning for STLF at the meter level.
The deployment of deep networks at other scales and horizons (other than
STLF) was not addressed in the literature. Deep learning networks architecture
used for STLF include: recurrent neural networks (RNN) [51] and Long Short-
Term Memory (LSTM) [52], Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) [53], and
Bayesian deep learning [54, 55]. An online RNN model was proposed in [56]
and an online LSTM model was proposed by [57]. In addition to these, recently
a hybrid network was also was designed for STLF (i.e. LSTM network with
CNN) [58, 59] and an RNN with LSTM [60].
2.1.3 Evaluation of Forecasting Techniques

The performance of load forecasting is assessed by performance metrics. Essen-
tially, the error metric quantifies the error between the predicted load and real
observation. The most commonly used evaluation measures are the coefficient
of variation (CV), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and root mean
square error (RMSE) [3]. Among these, CV is the most common evaluation
metric implemented in load forecasting for two reasons: (i) it is one of the mea-
sures used in benchmark data sets (such as ASHRAE), (ii) the prediction error
in this metric is unit-less and thus is more convenient for comparison purposes.
2.2 Smart Meter Analytics Domain: Knowledge

Discovery
The extraction of new information from data is the second area of smart meter
data analytics. Techniques used in this area range from traditional data mining
to deep learning and meta-heuristics. The following subsections survey different
functions within the area of knowledge discovery.
2.2.1 Load Profiling

Load profiling helps in grouping the consumers based on similarity in their
consumption behavior, and subsequently produces the Typical Load Profile
(TLP) for each group. The load profile is a graph/curve that represents the
variation of electrical usage over time. A load profiling problem can be formu-
lated as an unsupervised machine learning task, and hence, it is completely
data-driven.
Data Driven Load Profiling Techniques

Load profiling attempts to group similar consumers into a single cluster based
on similarities in consumption patterns. Based on the available literature, load
profiling can be defined as clustering high dimensional data with no labels,
and it is usually performed in three main stages:
• Data preparation: the dataset is pre-possessed and dimension reduction is
performed to deal with the problem of high dimensionality and compress the
size of data. This stage aims to map raw data into a new feature space, where
the generated data are easier to separate by existing classifiers. Traditional
data transformation approaches include linear and non-linear transforma-
tions, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Kernel, and Spectral
Methods respectively. A review of feature reduction techniques used for load
profiling is represented in [11].
• Load curve clustering: K-means, Fuzzy clustering (FCM), Hierarchical clus-

tering process, and Self Organize Maps (SOM) are some of the traditional
and most widely used clustering algorithms in load profiling.
• Evaluation: Smart meter readings are unlabeled and no structural knowledge
about the data set is available. As a result, calculating the optimum number
of clusters and evaluating the accuracy of clustering outcomes is a challeng-
ing task. The most popular method for determining the optimum number
of clusters is to run the clustering algorithm several times while attempting
various numbers of clusters, and then choose the number of clusters that
produces the best results in a predefined evaluation criterion function. Clus-
tering validity is usually evaluated with visualization, the goodness of fit as
well as scalar measurements [61]. The clustering quality also can be assessed
with clustering evaluation indexes such as the Silhouette Coefficient [62],
and Davies-Bouldin Index.
Load Profiling Using Deep Clustering

Traditional load profiling methods typically suffer from the curse of dimen-
sionality and thus perform poorly on high-dimensional smart meter readings.
As a result, feature reduction and feature transformation approaches have usu-
ally been used before clustering algorithms. Furthermore, on large-scale smart
meters datasets, these approaches typically suffer from large computational
complexity. This all leads to the use of more advantageous techniques in the
literature such as hybrid machine learning and deep learning.
As seen in Figures 3 and 1, the use of deep learning for load profiling is a
relatively recent research field. This is due to the fact that deep learning has
historically been employed for supervised-learning tasks, and the use of deep
learning for clustering is a novel and challenging research area in a variety of
applications. While deep learning has recently been applied for other realms
of smart meter analysis, such as load forecasting, load disaggregation and
dynamic pricing, it has rarely been used for improving the performance of load
profiling.
Recently published research [63] attempted to cover this gap in the litera-
ture by formulating load profiling as a clustering problem and solving it with
various deep learning clustering algorithms. While traditional clustering-based
load profiling algorithms require a complex feature reduction step to reduce
the dimensionality of smart meter readings, deep learning learning non-linear
mappings that enable data to be transformed into more clustering-friendly
representations without the need for the dimensionality reduction or feature
selection steps.
As a result, in traditional methods the consistency of the obtained load
profile usually suffers because of the high complexity of the data provided
by the feature reduction process. Deep clustering provides more efficient load
profiles by eliminating the pre-processing step and at the same time provides
better and more robust clusters for the various profiles. The comparative exper-
iments on the London Open Dataset (https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/)
shows DEC [64] raised the Silhouette Index [62] of the clusters from 0.084
for k-Means and 0.464 for Hierarchical Clustering into 0.59 for DEC [64] and
DynAE [65] deep clustering.
The paper [63] outlines a comparison with several other traditional cluster-
ing algorithms and shows that deep clustering outperforms them in obtaining
good load profiles. Please refer to [63] for a detailed comparative study of
the effectiveness of classical versus deep clustering methods for load profiling.
Furthermore, due to the temporal nature of smart meter readings, all tempo-
ral deep clustering networks are potentially suitable for load profiling tasks.
Different temporal deep network were described in [66].
Table 2 Publications with deep learning techniques against function
Load Load Load Dis- Fraud

Profiling Analysis aggregation Detection
Hybrid [67] [68],[69] [70]

Architecture (LSTM-CNN) (CNN-Auto Encoder) , (CNN-RNN)
Auto Encoder [63] [71],[72] [73]
RNN [74],[75]
CNN [76] [77] [78],[79]
Restricted Boltzmann [69],[80]

Machines (RBM)
Multi-Layer [81] [82]

Perceptron (MLP)
State-of-art networks WaveNet[83] [84] Deep Transform

Learning
2.2.2 Occupant Behaviour

Occupant behaviour refers to the discovery of elements that impact the load
curve and, as a result, the consumer’s lifestyle. To do so, smart meter readings
are combined with other related data sets, such as building characteristics,
weather statistics, calendar information, etc.
Data Driven Occupant Behaviour Techniques

In the literature, various techniques were used for occupant behavior identi-
fication but all of them have two main steps: discovering frequent itemsets
and generating association rules based on the frequent itemsets. For instance,
Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) [85] and Association rule mining (ARM) [86]
may be used for this task. The goal of motif discovery is to find frequently
recurring subsequences in a time series. A univariate time series is first seg-
mented into distinct subsequences depending on user-specified window size.
Certain distance measures are employed to assess the correlations between dif-
ferent pairs of subsequences. Motifs are discovered as sub-sequences with a
significant degree of similarity.
Deep Learning Occupant Behaviour Techniques

Although the main application of deep learning is within supervised learning,
it is often utilized in the literature for feature extraction because of its intrinsic
non-linear transformation property. Thus, deep learning is potentially a solu-
tion for occupant behavior problems. Deep learning architectures suitable for
feature extraction are described in [87]. Table 2 presents different deep network
architectures used for this task.
2.2.3 Load Disaggregation and Deep Learning Techniques

Load disaggregation is accomplished by examining the load of a household to
identify the various equipment used by the occupant. Giving end-users direct
and real-time input on the appliance’s usage can lead to energy savings. Fur-
thermore, load disaggregation can be used to further describe the lifestyle of
the consumers [88].
There are two main approaches to load disaggregation [89]:
• Intrusive Appliance Load Monitoring (IALM): By using sensors that are
attached to every appliance in the house, IALM can produce the operating
condition precisely.
• Non-Intrusive Appliance Load Monitoring (NILM): This technology involves
the practice of disaggregating the household’s total electrical load measured
into distinct appliance signals [90].
Data Driven and Deep Learning Techniques for Load

Disaggregation
The NILM method consists of two steps: extraction and identification. The
extraction phase transforms the smart meter readings into a collection of char-
acteristics that are utilized for load recognition. Following categorization, each
class will be allocated with an electrical signature. The detected events are
connected with a loads signature database in order to determine the load state
(on or off) and track the appliance usage over time. The load is identified
by using machine learning techniques [89, 91]. ILM algorithms used for smart
meter readings employ a variety of machine learning and deep learning tech-
niques. The different deep architectures used for this task are listed in [92].
Table 2 lists some publications along with the architectures used.
2.3 Fraud Detection

Energy fraud detection is a crucial component of the smart grid. Energy fraud-
sters can manipulate smart meter data in two ways: they consume more energy
while reporting less, or they report more energy for certain meters to obtain
additional advantages from the utility. Physical tampering, such as illegal tap-
ping, bypassing meters, firmware modification, and cyberattacks against the
AMI infrastructure are used to manipulate smart meter reading. Non-technical
loss (NTL) in power systems is mostly the result of electricity theft, billing
problems, and unpaid bills.
Data Driven and Deep Learning Techniques for Fraud

Detection
Machine learning and data mining have been widely utilized by researchers for
comprehensive intelligent data analysis in order to recognize typical patterns
of behavior so that deviations may be recognized as anomalies.
Fraud detection consists of the following stages [93]:
• Pre-possessing: Raw data goes through the pre-processing stage to extract
features for the NILM algorithm. Since feature selection has a direct effect
on algorithm output, feature selection algorithms can be used for defining
an optimal set of features[94].
• Machine learning: Two main categories of machine learning are used in:
supervised methods (for labeled data) including SVM, Artificial Neural
Networks (ANN), Optimum Path Forrest (OPF) and the Naı̈ve Bayes
Classifier; and Unsupervised methods (for unlabeled data) which include
self-organizing maps and regression methods.
• Evaluation: Depending on the type of algorithm used, different metrics are
used for assessing the performance of detection methods. Besides metrics
that evaluate the performance of machine learning algorithms, other metrics
are also defined to quantify the effects of the detection methods.
From the data science perspective this is a clustering and feature extraction
task. Deep learning was recently utilized for this job and Table 2 summarizes
the architectures used.
2.4 Smart Meter Analytics Domain: Energy Management

Smart grid technology provides innovative power approaches such as renew-
able energy sources, energy storage systems, car charged batteries, and so on.
Although the use of these new approaches provides several benefits, it also
poses certain problems for utilities. Energy management strategies are criti-
cal to overcoming these problems. Different tasks within the domain of energy
management are discussed briefly in the following sections.
2.4.1 Demand Response

The goal of this task is to reduce the utility’s overall load by reducing energy
consumption by customers. One way to do so is that for customers to adjust
the electricity consumption in response to the price assigned by the suppliers.
Dynamic pricing is another method for lowering energy use. The ultimate
goal of dynamic pricing is to reduce peak to average energy usage by utilizing
various price techniques. Implementing a deep network for this job is a new
research focus, as indicated in Figure 3. Table 3 shows some of the network
architectures used for this task. In addition to pure demand response, Long
Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks were utilized to improve the accuracy
of the forecasting task [95].
2.4.2 Home Energy Management Systems

A Home Energy Management System (HEMS) has the capability of controlling
the household loads, appliance scheduling and creating the optimal load and
it is one of the major aspects of smart cities [96]. From the programmer’s
point of view, HEMS is a scheduling problem that aims to produce optimal
production and consumption schedules by considering multiple objectives such
as reducing energy costs, environmental concerns, and consumer comfort. As
Table 3 shows, although traditional deep learning is not applicable in this task,
more advanced networks and techniques such as reinforced and adversarial
deep learning may be used.
Table 3 Deep learning research for tasks of energy management domain
HEMS Privacy & Security Demand response
Deep reinforcement learning [97] [98] [99],[100]
Auto Encoders [101].[102]
Recurrent Neural Networks RNN [75]
Adversarial deep learning [103]
SDAE (Stacked Denoising [104]

Autoencoder)
LSTM (long short-term memory) [105][106]
Hybrid architecture CNN-LSTM CNN-SVM

[107] [108]
2.4.3 Security and Privacy

Smart grid devices save and analyze vast quantities of data in cloud-based
storage units. This connection between smart grid IOT devices and cloud stor-
age providers is subject to several security risks. A weak security policy allows
intruders to seize control of power generation networks, steal customer informa-
tion, or inflict more harm. Furthermore, the smart grid offers two-way real-time
communication, it gathers sub-hourly power consumption from smart meters
and sends alerts to smart meters if required. Since the communication between
the smart meter and provider is mostly through open networks, they intro-
duce many vulnerable points for network-based threats. Fine-grained smart
meter data may be used to infer socio-demographic information. Consumption
data collected and communicated by smart meters may disclose sensitive infor-
mation about households such as habits, lifestyle choices, and even religious
views.
These all emphasize the growing interest in privacy-enhancing technology
in the smart meter analysis. Cryptographic techniques for assuring privacy-
preserving smart meter data management under the trusted operator model, as
well as privacy-preserving solutions for data processing under the non-trusted
operator model was examined in [109]. So, providing data protection along
with smart meter analysis is crucial.
Recently Differential Privacy (DP) algorithms were used to protect per-
sonal information. Differential privacy is a method that allows researchers
and database analysts to extract relevant information from databases holding
people’s personal information without disclosing personal information about
individuals. For example, in [110] DP property added to forecasting imple-
mentation through benefiting from Google’s TensorFlow Privacy library [110].
Table 3 represents some deep networks used for this task.
3 Load Profiling Experimental Results

To demonstrate the power of deep learning, this section presents experimen-
tal results that compare load profiling methods that use classical clustering
methods with the performance of a deep clustering algorithm (DynAE) used
in [63], who showed the superiority of deep clustering over traditional methods
for the London Open Data set (https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/).
As discussed in sub-section 2.2.1, the goal of load profiling for smart meter
data is to group the consumers based on similarity in their consumption behav-
ior. These groups (load profiles) are assessed based on several standard metrics.
For evaluation, we adopt the Silhouette Index (SI), which is a well known mea-
sure for unlabeled data that has shown to be a good metric [62]. SI values
range between -1 and 1, and the higher the SI coefficient value the better the
clustering results.
To implement the experiment, the ISSDA Irish open smart meter dataset
(CER Smart Metering Project Electricity Customer Behaviour Trial, 2009-
2010, https://www.ucd.ie/issda/) was selected, which records smart meter
readings for more than 5000 homes from 2009 to 2010. The same dataset was
used for performing load profiling by [111] who presented a hybrid algorithm
that uses k-Means and a Spectral Clustering. The experiment presented here
will compare the deep clustering results with their results.
To compare the performance between traditional and deep learning algo-
rithms, the experiment was conducted on the ISSDA data set using the
following techniques:
• k-Means clustering: A traditional and standard method for clustering
unlabelled data.
• Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM): A traditional clustering method.
• Agglomerative Hierarchichal Clustering: A traditional method.
• CKSC [111]: A hybrid method that uses both k-Means and Spectral
clustering algorithms.
• Dynamic Auto-Encoder (DynAE): A recenyly proposed deep clustering
method for load profiling [63].
Note that while the original set had a total of 6435 houses, in the pre-
processing stage we removed houses with NaN values or zero meter readings
(149 houses). Thus the experiment was conducted on 6286 houses with a time-
series that starts from 1pm on the 14th of July.
The pre-processing phase flipped the data so that the rows are the houses
and the columns represent smart meter readings (for more details please
see [63]. The dimensions of the resulting matrix was 6286 rows and 26010
columns.
The Dynamic Auto-Encoder network used in the experiment was a deep
network with 6286, 2000, 3000, 2000, 1000, 365, 1000, 2000, 3000, 2000, 6286
units respectively. The batch size was 250 and the optimizer used was ADAM.
Table 4 shows the Silhouette Index results for different cluster numbers (k)
and the various algorithms.
Table 4 Silhouette Index (SI) results for classical vs the deep clustering method DynAE
Classical Clustering Deep Clustering
k
k-Means GMM Agglomerative CKSC [111] DynAE
2 0.7829 0.6627 0.5431 0.4250 0.7395
3 0.7040 0.0832 0.1248 0.2330 0.6158
4 0.5032 0.0357 0.0087 0.2400 0.5285
5 0.1744 -0.0277 0.0002 0.1230 0.5090
6 0.1803 -0.0342 -0.1287 0.1230 0.5167
7 0.1728 -0.0463 -0.1345 0.1330 0.5404
8 0.1751 -0.4430 -0.2450 0.1050 0.5204
Note that as explained in [111] and in [63], the SI values for small values of
k are disregarded because these algorithms do not form good clusters for small
values of k and tend to group all customers in one or two clusters. As shown
in Figure 5 and using the elbow method, the best clusters were obtained for
this data set at k = 5 and k = 6. This was also supported by the result of
CKSC investigation [64]. Although k-Means performed well for small values of
k in the experiment, for k = 5 and k = 6 the deep learning DynAE algorithm
performed much better than all the traditional clustering methods (including
the hybrid CKSC algorithm).
As discussed in sub-section 2.2.1, the deep learning algorithm also has the
advantage of better performance with high dimensional data (26010 columns),
and it also performs pre-processing and feature selection automatically [63].
The results in Figure 5 and Table 4 clearly show the strengths of deep learning
for high dimensional data such as smart meter readings for an extended amount
of time.
Fig. 5 Visualization of experimental results for the elbow method
4 Challenges and Opportunities

As was demonstrated in the previous section and the literature, deep learning
is a promising approach for many applications that utilize smart meter data.
However, research within the field still has several challenges and opportunities,
which are described in the following subsections.
4.1 Challenges
The challenges facing deep learning research in the smart-meter field stem
from the nature of big data, as well as the lack of experience and results in
applying deep learning methods within the field.
• Access to Real-World Data: The first key challenge facing researchers in
smart meter data analytics is shared among all data science projects that
require real data sets. Despite the fact that smart meters are widely deployed
in many countries, the quantity of publicly available data sets for research
purposes is quite restricted. The utilities and electric suppliers control the
data and very few made some data sets public, limiting the amount of
relevant real world experiments that can be conducted.
• Variety and Data Granularity: Another data challenge is that each job neces-
sitates a different degree of data granularity, thus access to a different type of
smart meter reading is required for each domain. For example, the load dis-
aggregation task requires data to be read every one second, whereas demand
response requires data to be read every one minute.
On the other hand, researchers attempted to utilize different granularity of

the data to perform STLF by using RNNs that focused on the time domain
vs another deep network that used the frequency domain [51].
• Volume and Velocity: Another data problem stems from the nature of the
large amount of data in smart meters. Because of the velocity and vol-
ume of smart meter readings, algorithms and platforms that can interface
with big data are required. Although numerous traditional machine learn-
ing techniques were employed for smart meter analytics on small sizes, the
massive nature of these readings, as well as recent developments, provide
new possibilities and have resulted in a new problem [22].
• Privacy Concerns: Merging smart meter data with other relevant data sets,
such as housing characteristics or socio-demographic data, which is essen-
tial for some tasks such as occupant behavior, raises an additional difficulty
for researchers. These types of data sets are not commonly available due to
privacy concerns. As a result, one of the major barriers to adopting these
tasks of smart meter data analysis is privacy concerns inherited from the
data analytics sector. Computational solutions that preserve privacy while
enabling knowledge discovery is always an interesting field of study for
researchers. Deep learning networks and transfer learning might provide a
possible approach for addressing this challenge [109].
• Network Selection: Implementing state of art networks developed for other
areas, such as computer vision, natural language processing, semantic anal-
ysis, speech recognition, and sequence analysis, for smart meter analysis is
a new trend in smart meter analysis, as shown in Table 2. However, finding
the best network for each task remains as a challenge.
In addition to this, smart meter analysis with deep learning inherits one
challenge from the deep learning field. Traditionally deep learning was imple-
mented for supervised-learning tasks and implementing deep learning for
clustering (unsupervised) is a new trend in the research. This is reflected in
Table 1, as the number of papers that use deep learning for load profiling
(which is naturally unsupervised) tasks grows within the literature.
Furthermore, one open question in smart meter analysis is the sequential
nature of its data. Although the time series nature of the data has been
considers by researchers, but the question which remains open: “will the
results improve in all tasks by considering sequential properties of data set?”.
4.2 Research Opportunities

The following are some of the research opportunities in smart meter analytics
presented by the deep learning methods.
• Incremental, Streaming and Online Learning A big-data solution that can
process vast amounts of streaming data read by smart meters to extract rel-
evant information, is needed for smart houses to make decisions and respond
to environmental conditions automatically. This solution should be able to
act on both real-time and historical data. For processing streaming data,
incremental and online learning are two viable options. Since smart meter
data are real-time stream data, methods derived from these techniques, such
as online dictionary learning [80] and incremental machine learning [112],
may be used to analyze continuous streams of smart meter data.
• Edge Computing: As implementing deep learning for smart meter analysis
relies on the instant availability of the required compute resources, smart
meter data collection and storage takes place primarily on the cloud. Net-
work constraints and cloud access may also impede real-time applications.
Edge Computing is a new method to address these drawbacks, which is a
computing model that makes computing and storage resources available at
the network’s edge while simultaneously minimizing latency and bandwidth
consumption; resulting in reduced network delays and congestion [113].
• Deep Clustering and Transfer Learning: While applying deep learning in
smart meter analysis with classification nature shows promising results, it is
an open research field for other tasks such as load profiling. Implementing
state of art networks deployed for other domains, such as computer vision,
natural language, etc; for smart meter analysis is also a new trend in the
field [83]. Besides deep learning, other emerging data science trends, such
as reinforcement learning, privacy preserving transfer learning, and hybrid
machine learning approaches, can be employed in various smart meter anal-
ysis tasks. As shown in Table 1, implementing state of art networks, which
refers to networks that were trained and used for other domain, is a new
approach in the smart meter field.
5 Conclusion
The availability of technologically advanced computer systems and scientific
advances in the field of computing enables the use of complex and computa-
tionally expensive deep learning algorithms to provide successful solutions to a
wide range of engineering problems. Deep neural networks have shown promis-
ing performance in the smart meter analysis field, which is a multidisciplinary
research problem that can benefit from the power of such algorithms.
This review introduced the intersection between smart meter data analyt-
ics and deep neural networks. The body of knowledge was structured using
a new taxonomy that organizes the research into three broad domains: fore-
casting, knowledge discovery, and energy management. The tasks in each area
were explained and reviewed by investigating the deep neural architectures
employed.
The literature survey reveals the growing use of deep learning techniques
in addressing various smart meter analytic application. Due to their flexibility
and scalability, and their excellent classification accuracy, deep neural networks
show promising results for some smart meter analysis tasks as well as emerging
areas such as security and forecasting.
The review also indicates that, while academics are beginning to apply deep
learning in specific smart meter analysis jobs, building tailored deep networks
for the many domains of smart meter analysis remains an open research field.
In addition to discussing the potential that deep learning networks provide
to smart meter analytics, this paper also demonstrated that other emerging
data science trends, such as reinforcement learning and hybrid machine learn-
ing approaches also can be potentially be used for the task. Implementing a
deep clustering for smart meter tasks is a promising open research area and
has many potential applications.
The comparative experiment presented in Table 4 showed the advantages
of using deep learning for load profiling through better SI results over many of
the well known classical algorithms. Furthermore, deep learning tends to work
well for data with high dimensions and in many cases performs some of the
pre-processing tasks automatically.
The literature also emphasizes the importance of new techniques such as
transfer learning to overcome the limitation of smart meter analysis tasks. This
allows complicated network structures to be trained for other domains in smart
meter analysis. There are many opportunities for new computer technologies
such as edge computing as they are introduced to smart meter analytics tasks,
in order to achieve real-time and online applications of deep learning. In the
future, smart meter analysis may be deployed in edge devices that use deep
learning that has been well-trained on the cloud, as well as other advanced AI
technologies, to accomplish real-time inference.
Declarations
• Acknowledgment: We thank Michael Hutton of the ōbex project for language
editing support.
• Funding: Not applicable
• Conflict of interest: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter

*Corresponding author(s). E-mail(s): e.eskandar@bub.bh;

Keywords: Big data, Deep Learning, Smart Grid , Machine Learning ,

2 Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter Data

1.1 Smart Meter Intelligence

Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter Data 3

Fig. 1 An overview of the smart meter intelligence workflow

2. Pre-Processing and Exploration: The data is pre-processed through data

4 Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter Data

Typical architecture designs of deep learning include Convolutions Neural

1.2 A Taxonomy of Smart Meter Analytics

Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter Data 5

2. Knowledge discovery refers to new information extracted from raw

Fig. 2 A Taxonomy of Smart Meter Analytic [1]

2 Deep Learning for Smart Meter Analytics

6 Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter Data

Fig. 3 Number of article per year based on taxonomy domain

On the other hand, Figure 4 presents the number of articles published

Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter Data 7

Fig. 4 Number of article per year based on deep learning architecture

2.1 Smart Meter Analytics Domain: Forecasting

8 Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter Data

• Meter-level load forecasting[26]: This type of forecasting refers to domestic

2.1.1 Pre-Processing and Data Wrangling

2.1.2 Forecasting Algorithms

Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter Data 9

Table 1 Publications of various load forecasting techniques against scale

Short-Term Mid-Term Long-Term

Neural Liu et. al 2017 [41] Chen et. al 2012 [42]

Time- Chaouch 2014 [44] Lee & de Oliveira

Statistical Ghofrani 2011[47] Eskandarnia 2021[24] Hong et al. 2014 [48]

Machine Lusis 2017 [49] Hu et al. 2015 [37]

Fuzzy Lee & Chen 2012 [43]

10 Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter Data

2.1.3 Evaluation of Forecasting Techniques

2.2 Smart Meter Analytics Domain: Knowledge

2.2.1 Load Profiling

Data Driven Load Profiling Techniques

Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter Data 11

• Load curve clustering: K-means, Fuzzy clustering (FCM), Hierarchical clus-

Load Profiling Using Deep Clustering

12 Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter Data

Table 2 Publications with deep learning techniques against function

Load Load Load Dis- Fraud

Hybrid [67] [68],[69] [70]

Auto Encoder [63] [71],[72] [73]

CNN [76] [77] [78],[79]

Restricted Boltzmann [69],[80]

Multi-Layer [81] [82]

State-of-art networks WaveNet[83] [84] Deep Transform

2.2.2 Occupant Behaviour

Data Driven Occupant Behaviour Techniques

Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter Data 13

Deep Learning Occupant Behaviour Techniques

2.2.3 Load Disaggregation and Deep Learning Techniques

Data Driven and Deep Learning Techniques for Load

2.3 Fraud Detection

14 Deep Learning Techniques for Smart Meter Data

Data Driven and Deep Learning Techniques for Fraud

2.4 Smart Meter Analytics Domain: Energy Management

2.4.1 Demand Response