Applied Energy 329 (2023) 120223

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Applied Energy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apenergy

Transfer learning for multi-objective non-intrusive load monitoring in smart

building
Dandan Li a,e , Jiangfeng Li b , Xin Zeng c , Vladimir Stankovic b , Lina Stankovic b ,
Changjiang Xiao d,f , Qingjiang Shi a,e ,∗
a
School of Software Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
b Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
c College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
d College of Surveying and Geo-Information, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
e
Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, Shenzhen, China
f
Frontiers Science Center for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: Buildings represent 39% of global greenhouse gas emissions, thus reducing carbon emissions in buildings is
NILM of importance to greenhouse gas emissions reductions. This requires understanding how electricity is utilized
Energy disaggregation in the buildings, then optimizing electricity management to seek conservation of energy. Non-intrusive load
Transfer learning
monitoring (NILM) is a technique that disaggregates a house’s total load to estimate each appliance’s electric
One-to-many model
power usage. Several strategies for estimating one appliance at a time (one-to-one model) have been presented
and experimentally proven to be effective, with two mainstream trends: appliance transfer learning and cross-
domain transfer learning. The former refers to the transfer between different types of appliances in the same
data domain, while the latter refers to the transfer between different data domains for the same type of
appliance. Different from the previous work, this paper explores the approach of adopting one model for all
appliances (one-to-many model) and proposes a novel transfer learning scheme, that incorporates appliance
transfer learning and cross-domain transfer learning. Thus, a well-trained model can be transferred and
utilized to effectively estimate the power consumption in another data set for all appliances, which demands
fewer measurements and only one model. Three public data sets, REFIT, REDD, and UK-DALE, are used
in our experiments. Further, a set of smart electricity meters was deployed in a practical non-residential
building to validate the proposed method. The results demonstrate the accuracy and practicality compared
to start-of-the-art one-to-one NILM transferred models.

1. Introduction
Climate change has been raised as one of the great threats and
as such attracts global attention [1,2]. To mitigate the negative ef-
fects of climate change, it is urgently required to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions and approach net-zero targets [3]. In reaching net-
zero targets, buildings play a crucial role, as buildings represent 39%
of global greenhouse gas emissions [4]. This requires understanding
how electricity is utilized in the buildings, then optimizing electricity
management to seek conservation of energy [5].
Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is a cost-effective and promis-
ing approach that enables estimating individual building loads without
a need for separate, appliance metering. It aims at disaggregating
the total energy consumption of a building down to individual appli-
ances [6,7], improving appliance anomaly detection [8] and facilitating
effective energy feedback [9]. In recent years, the research on NILM has
been intensified due to practical demands (improving energy efficiency
and meeting global climate change targets) and the availability of data
via massive roll-out of smart meters [10].
From the perspective of data usage, NILM can be divided into
high-frequency and low-frequency approaches according to the sam-
pling frequency of the raw data [11]. High-frequency data has the
apparent advantages due to the large information content available
for processing. As presented in [12], with high-frequency data, it is
even possible to distinguish identical appliances. However, the high fre-
quency requires high cost for both hardware dedicated infrastructure,
extra installation effort as well as data storage and processing. In recent
years, with the pervasive roll-out of low-frequency smart meters, NILM
research tends to explore low-frequency approaches [13].

∗ Corresponding author at: School of Software Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China.
E-mail address: shiqj@tongji.edu.cn (Q. Shi).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2022.120223
Received 13 July 2022; Received in revised form 6 October 2022; Accepted 23 October 2022
Available online 8 November 2022
0306-2619/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
D. Li et al.
Various NILM approaches established on low-frequency data can
be roughly classified into event-based and non event-based categories
depending on whether or not there is a clear state change detec-
tion [14]. In the previous research, the event-based methods are the
main trend [15]. The work in [16] proposed a multi-class classifi-
cation model that uses current shapelets to extract features of each
appliance. The work in [17] proposed a graph signal processing based
method for NILM, based on which [18] proposed a training-less so-
lution. With a large availability of data for training models, recently,
deep learning-based methods have been popular for NILM as non-event-
based methods. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture
for sequence-to-point NILM, disaggregating one appliance at a time,
was first proposed in [19]. Furthermore, the work in [20] proposed a
fully-convolutional denoising auto-encoder architecture for large non-
residential buildings. In addition, the work in [21] employed a 3-
layers CNN architecture for NILM, which can estimate the electricity
consumption of multiple appliances simultaneously.
Though a large number of network architectures have been pro-
posed in the literature, there are still clear gaps between academic
research and practical application: (1) Data Scarcity: The lack of la-
beled data is an open issue for NILM [22], since gathering sufficient
training data takes a long time in practice. How to use less training
data in practical applications while maintaining accuracy remains a
challenge [13]. (2) Model Complexity: Complex approaches often re-
quire high computing power, which limits the large-scale application
of models [23].
To address the aforementioned challenges, this paper proposes a
one-to-many model transfer strategy, building upon initial results from
our conference paper [24]. The first challenge is addressed via an
architecture optimized for transfer learning (transferring the knowledge
of the same appliances among different datasets). The second challenge
is addressed by having a single network for all appliances, training
and testing a single model for the entire household, instead of one
model per appliance. The performance is verified on three public data
sets (REFIT [25], REDD [26], and UK-DALE [27]). In particular, the
proposed workflow contains three steps: pre-training using labeled
source data, retraining of the last two dense layers utilizing the target
data, and fine-tuning the CNN layers with the target data. Fair compar-
isons with the state-of-the-art transfer learning model [28] are further
provided to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach.
To demonstrate the efficiency of the network for real-time NILM
processing, we equipped a non-residential building with energy meters
and disaggregate six appliances: washer, fridge, air conditioner, server,
freezer, and a central air conditioner (CAC). The proposed model is
trained with REFIT data, and then retrained and fine-tuned with the
collected data. Promising results were obtained after the practical test
and application.
The key contributions of this paper are three-fold:
1. A one-to-many NILM model is designed (one model for all
appliances), which significantly reduces the model size and the
complexity of NILM for multiple appliances.
2. A transfer one-to-many NILM model is first proposed. Thus, a
well-trained model can be transferred to be used for another data
set, effectively estimating power consumption for all appliances,
with fewer measurements and less training.
3. A novel metric, Overall Disaggregation Proportion Error (ODPE),
is defined to measure the disaggregation error of each type of
electrical appliance from the perspective of load ratio.
We organized the paper as follows. Section 2 provides an elaborate
discussion of multi-object learning and transfer learning for NILM.
Section 3 starts by describing how meters and devices are deployed
in buildings for NILM, and the formulation of the NILM problem. Sec-
tion 4 introduces the proposed model to address the one-to-many NILM
problem and transfer learning in the NILM problem. Section 5 follows
up with a detailed experimental design, experimental dataset, metrics,
and results. Finally, the conclusions and future work are presented in
Section 6.
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Applied Energy 329 (2023) 120223
2. Related work
NILM has been extensively studied as a tool that can support energy
management, smart home automation, and demand response mea-
sures [15,29]. Here we provide an elaborate discussion about the
related work on multi-task learning and transfer learning for NILM.
2.1. Multi-object learning
For practical NILM applications, a multi-object classification model
is often a desirable option because it requires fewer parameters to
optimize, and requires less training time, fewer computational re-
sources and less storage demands. Consequently, a few studies have
investigated multi-object classification for NILM [30]. The work in [31]
provided a complete NILM architecture containing event type classi-
fication, load identification, event sample detection, and the multi-
classification. The work in [23] applied Signal2Vec dimensionality
reduction for NILM multi-object classification. The work in [32] used
a combination of multi-object classification and convolutional transfer
learning for NILM. See [33] for a review of existing multi-object
classification algorithms. Overall, the state-of-the-art multi-object clas-
sification methods produce promising results, but some challenges
remain.
Indeed, the above approaches require large amounts of labeled
appliance power data [34]. To address this problem, transfer learning is
used in the NILM model to reduce the amount of required training data.
In the following, the data used to pre-train the model is referred to as
source data, while the data to be disaggregated is referred to as target
data. Transfer learning models, in general, learn and store knowledge
from source data before applying it to target data.
2.2. Transfer learning
As reviewed in [13], the transferring models are great opportunities
to tackle the problem of data scarcity. Currently, the research on the
application of transfer learning in NILM is limited. As the inception of
transfer learning for the NILM task, the work in [35] firstly designed
two data-driven deep learning-based architectures (CNN and GRU) for
NILM. Cross-domain transfer learning was applied to REFIT, UK-DALE,
and REDD datasets. Across all three datasets, both networks predict
state and consumption; a significant performance loss is observed when
training and testing datasets are different. Another transfer learning
scheme, appliance-domain transfer learning, was proposed in [28]. The
work in [28] employed a one-to-one transferring model, which can
predict one appliance at a time.
Further, the work in [36] proposed a transfer learning-based NILM
model, which uses a long short-term memory neural network to extract
features and then classify the appliance type with a probabilistic neural
network. This model can infer the appliance type with limited mea-
surement, however, it needs prior knowledge of electrical appliances,
e.g., rated power.
Meta-learning is the second kind of transfer learning model, based
on which [37] was proposed. Using the source data, this model pre-
trained the parameters to identify more general initial parameters for a
quick training with target data. Nonetheless, instead of fine-tuning, it
focuses on training a new generic model, which is then used to estimate
one appliance at a time.
Despite the above progress, NILM still faces the following chal-
lenges, which can be addressed by our proposed method:
1. Current multi-object models mainly focus on a few typical appli-
ances rather than all the appliances in the circuit. It is not clear
whether all the appliances in a data set can be disaggregated
with an adaptive single model, i.e., using one model for all
appliances (one-to-many model) instead of one model for each
appliance or a few typical appliances.
D. Li et al.
Fig. 1. Compared to intrusive load monitoring, the electricity meters between the
electricity distribution bins and the appliances can be eliminated when NILM is used.
2. It is unclear whether this one-to-many model can be made trans-
ferable and how it compares with the one-to-one transferability
model. Additionally, very little attention has been devoted to
transfer learning based on one-to-many models for NILM.
3. Problem formulation
Understanding how electricity is used in buildings at the appliance
level is necessary for improving energy efficiency [38]. There are
two main options for estimating the electric power consumption of
each appliance: (a) installing a meter at each appliance and (b) using
the NILM method [39]. Compared with the former method, NILM’s
main advantage is the requirement for only one single electric meter
deployed to monitor the overall load, as illustrated in Fig. 1. The main
meter is connected to the indoor electricity distribution bin, which
is connected directly to each electrical appliance without electricity
meters between them.
The main meter power measurement at time stamp 𝑡, 𝑦𝑡 , can be
expressed as:
∑
𝑁 density function of all 𝑁 appliances for each window 𝜏. 𝜃 denotes the
𝑦𝑡 = 𝑥(𝑖)
𝑡 + 𝜖,
𝑖=1
where 𝑁 denotes the number of known appliances in the building,
and 𝑥(𝑖)𝑡 is the electric consumption of appliance 𝑖 at time stamp 𝑡.
𝜖 represents the noise which includes measurement noise and all un-
known load; it is usually modeled as a random variable with Gaussian
distribution. The task of NILM is to estimate 𝑥(𝑖)
𝑡 given 𝑦𝑡 for each time
stamp 𝑡.
The conventional, one-model-for-one appliance (one-to-one) model
(𝑗)
estimates 𝑥(𝑖)
𝑡 for each 𝑖, independently from other 𝑥𝑡 , 𝑗 ≠ 𝑖; that is,
a separate model is built for each appliance and NILM classification
is executed 𝑁 times. Some methods then perform correction step to
ensure that the sum of the estimated loads is below the aggregate 𝑦𝑡 .
On the other hand, the proposed one-to-many model estimates 𝑥(𝑖) 𝑡 for
all 𝑖 in one pass, without requiring separate models for each appliance.
4. Proposed approach
Following recent trends [13], and capitalizing on a large amount
of open access electrical measurements data, in this paper, a novel
deep learning-based NILM method is proposed. In contrast to existing
methods, the proposed method offers high transferrability of the model
(reducing the labeling effort) and low complexity. In this section, first,
we describe the classical sequence-to-point architecture and one-to-one
model, then focus on the proposed one-to-many model and its design,
and last introduce the adaptive domain transfer learning strategy.
Applied Energy 329 (2023) 120223
4.1. Sequence-to-point (seq2point) architecture
In a seq2point architecture, the raw data is divided into short
time windows (i.e., sequences), and the data from each window of
the main electricity meter is used to estimate the power consumption
of the targeted appliance at the window’s midpoint using a neural
network [40]. The model can be expressed as
𝑥̂ (𝑖) (𝑖)
𝑡 = 𝑓 (𝑦𝜏 ) + 𝜖, (2)
0
where 𝑦𝜏 (𝜏 = 1, … , 𝑇 ) represents the 𝜏-th window of the input aggre-
gate data, and 𝑇 is the number of windows. 𝜖 represents the model
noise and 𝑥̂ (𝑖)
𝑡0 is the output of the model, i.e., the estimated power for
appliance 𝑖 at 𝑡0 , which is the middle point of the window 𝜏. 𝑓 (𝑖) (⋅) is
a mapping function of 𝑦𝜏 to 𝑥̂ (𝑖)
𝑡0 for appliance 𝑖 and it is different for
each appliance. For each appliance, the model’s output is based on the
maximizing model’s aposteriori probability and can be formulated as:
∏
𝑇
max 𝑝 (𝑥̂ (𝑖)
𝑡 ∣ 𝑦𝜏 , 𝜃𝑖 ), (3)
0
𝜏=1
where 𝜃𝑖 denotes the entire network parameters for appliance 𝑖, and
each appliance requires such a model.
The One-to-one (one model for one appliance) model for solving
Eq. (3) builds a separate model 𝜃𝑖 for each appliance. This one-to-one
model-based method is widely adapted in most recent NILM archi-
tectures [18,28,41], where one model is trained for each appliance
to increase the likelihood of correctly predicting a certain type of
appliance.
4.2. One-to-many model
In this paper, we improve disaggregation efficiency by using a
one-to-many (one model for many appliances) structure. The model
takes into account all 𝑁 appliances at the same time, resulting in the
following problem formulation:
∏
𝑇
max 𝑝(𝑥̂ (1)
𝑡 ,𝑥̂ (2) ̂ (𝑁)
𝑡 ,…,𝑥 𝑡 ∣ 𝑦𝜏 , 𝜃), (4)
0 0 0
𝜏=1
where 𝑝(𝑥̂ (1) ̂ (2)
𝑡0 , 𝑥 ̂ (𝑁)
𝑡0 , … , 𝑥 𝑡0 ∣ 𝑦𝜏 , 𝜃) is a joint conditional probability
(1) overall network parameters of the NILM model. Therefore, the one-to-
many model requires only one model for all appliances, and requires
less storage and computational resources.
In order to solve the NILM problem represented by Eq. (4), we
provide an efficient CNN architecture that constructs the one-to-many
model to estimate all appliances in the household in one run of the
network using one model. The continuous recorded main power con-
sumptions are divided into 𝑇 time-windows, each containing 2𝑡0 + 1
samples. Thus the input data has the shape of 𝑇 ∗ (2𝑡0 + 1) ∗ 1. The
total units in the output layer are denoted as 𝑁, which is set by the
number of appliances to be disaggregated.
The designed CNN architecture, as shown in Fig. 2, consists of
four convolution layers that capture time-dependent information in the
receptive field. Fig. 2 shows the filter size, stride, and padding that we
employed in all simulations.
4.3. Adaptive domain transfer learning
The model described in the previous subsection relies on the net-
work’s generalization ability, and is expected to work well if the test
data distribution follows well the training data distribution. This is a
reasonable assumption if training and test datasets are generated from
the same domain [22], which in the context of this paper, means the
same building [28]. Cross-domain transfer learning therefore can be
described as the model trained on one building and tested on another
building.
3
D. Li et al.
Fig. 2. The structure of the proposed one-to-many NILM model.
Fig. 3. The process of the proposed transfer one-to-many NILM model.
Further, we consider if the NILM model developed for one domain
can be reused as the initial point for a model on another domain. Source
domain refers to the collected training data and usually, is a large data
set. The target domain is the data to be disaggregated (i.e., test dataset).
To design a model that generalizes well across different but similar
domains, i.e., that enables transfer learning, we adapt the approach
proposed in [28] as shown in Fig. 3.
The first 4 layers learn generic features from the source domain,
and as shown in Section 4.2 architecture, and are unchanged when the
source and target domains are different. The few top layers learn more
specialized features for each appliance and are fine-tuned to work with
the target domain. In our method, the number of output appliances
in the target model is adaptive because it is automatically set to the
number of appliances to be disaggregated in the target data set.
Overall, the steps of the proposed one-to-many transfer learning
method are as follows, (1) obtain the pre-trained one-to-many model
(Section 4.2); (2) create a base model, which has the same structure
as the pre-trained model; (3) train the dense layers using the labeled
target data set while not changing the CNN layers; (5) finally, in
contrast to [28], we further improve the model via fine-tuning of
hyper-parameters.
4
Applied Energy 329 (2023) 120223
Table 1
The description of the four data sets used in this work.
Data set House index Number of appliances
REFIT 11, 20 9, 9
REDD 1, 2, 5 20, 11, 26
UK-DALE 3, 4 53, 19
SC-EDNRR 1 6
5. Experiments
5.1. Datasets
We evaluate the proposed method using three open access data sets,
widely used in NILM research, namely, REFIT, REDD, and UK-DALE, as
well as our own recorded data that we refer to as SC-EDNRR. Table 1
shows the data sets used in this paper, the specific houses used, and the
number of labeled appliances in each house. We always use the entire
available dataset for each considered house.
(1) REFIT. The cleaned REFIT dataset contains electrical measure-
ments from 20 households in the Loughborough area of the UK from
2013 to 2014 [42]. Nine appliances are monitored in each house, and
all data are recorded at 8-second intervals. Five types of appliances,
namely kettle, microwave, fridge, dishwasher, and washing machine
are the most commonly used baseline appliances in related NILM
state-of-the-art literature. Since only two REFIT houses contain all five
appliances, houses 11 and 20, are chosen for training and testing in this
paper. We use data in the period from 30/Jul/2014 to 14/Aug/2014 to
make up samples described in Table 2.
(2) REDD. Reference Energy Disaggregation Data set (REDD) [43]
comprises power usage data from 6 US households. Each house has two
main meters and 10 to 25 individual appliance monitoring meters. The
data is sampled once every 3 s. Houses 1 and 2 are chosen for training
and testing since they contain all the five baseline appliances. We use
data in the period from 11/May/2011 to 23/May/2011 to make up
samples described in Table 2.
(3) UK-DALE. The UK Domestic Appliance-Level Electricity (UK-
DALE) [44] dataset contains readings from 5 UK houses. A main meter
and several individual appliance meters are used in each house, and the
electrical measurements are collected every 6 s. Houses 3 and 4 have
relatively complete data and have been chosen as training and testing
data. We use data in the period from 03/May/2013 to 13/May/2013
to make up samples described in Table 2.
(4) SC-EDNRR. For a more thorough examination of the proposed
network and to verify its applicability to another country and real-
time performance, a set of smart meters were installed in a room of a
non-residential facility. The data set is dubbed ‘‘Energy Disaggregation
data set in a Non-Residential Room in Shanghai, China’’ (SC-EDNRR),
which consists of six appliances: freezer, fridge, washer, air conditioner,
D. Li et al. Applied Energy 329 (2023) 120223

Fig. 4. A diagram of the room’s energy meters, which include a main power meter and six appliance electrical meters used to generate SC-ENDRR dataset.

Table 2
The description of the four data sets used in the four experiments of this work. K: Thousand.
Case Pre-training Fine-tuning Testing
Dataset House Samples (K) Dataset House Samples (K) Dataset House Samples (K)
i REFIT 11 199.6 REFIT 20 84.3 REFIT 20 63.2
ii REFIT 11 199.6 REDD 1, 2, 5 35.1 REDD 1, 2 63.2
iii REFIT 11 199.6 UK-DALE 3, 4 71.7 UK-DALE 3, 4 63.2
iv REFIT 11 199.6 SC-ENDRR 1 39.5 SC-ENDRR 1 179.8

central air conditioner (CAC), and a computer server. As in REFIT and
REDD datasets, to provide ground truth, each appliance is monitored by
an individual appliance energy meter. The overall power usage is pro-
vided by a single main meter. The data set covers a four-month period
from 22/Sep/2021 to 13/Jan/2022 and is sampled once per second.
The smart meters and equipment in the room are depicted in Fig. 4. The
dataset is available on https://pureportal.strath.ac.uk/en/datasets/energy-
disaggregation-data-set-in-a-non-residential-room-in-shang.
Since the REFIT has 8-seconds intervals, all other data sets were
resampled to 8 s as well.
5.2. Metrics
To evaluate the performance, we use three metrics commonly used
in recent NILM literature [28]: mean Normalized Disaggregation Error
(NDE), normalized Signal Aggregate Error (SAE), and Energy per Day
(EpD). NDE measures the normalized error of the squared difference,
and is defined as:
∑ ( )2
𝑖,𝑡 𝑥𝑖𝑡 − 𝑥 ̂ 𝑖𝑡
𝑁𝐷𝐸 = ∑ 2
, (5)
𝑖,𝑡 𝑥𝑖𝑡
where 𝑖 ∈ {1, … , 𝑁} denotes appliance number, 𝑁 is the total number
of all appliances, and 𝑡 indicates the time step. 𝑥𝑖𝑡 and 𝑥̂ 𝑖𝑡 denote the
real consumption and the estimated consumption of appliance 𝑖 at time
𝑡, respectively.
SAE is used to evaluate the difference between the total energy
consumption and estimated energy consumption:
|𝑟𝑖 − 𝑟̂𝑖 |
𝑆𝐴𝐸 = , (6)
𝑟𝑖
∑
where 𝑟𝑖 = 𝑡 𝑥𝑖𝑡 denotes the total energy consumption of appliance 𝑖
∑
for all time step 𝑡 in the test period, while 𝑟̂𝑖 = 𝑡 𝑥̂ 𝑖𝑡 represents the its
estimated total energy consumption.
EpD is a metric to measure daily prediction error:
1 ∑
𝐷
𝐸𝑝𝐷 = |𝑒 − 𝑒̂𝑖 |, (7)
𝐷 𝑑=1 𝑖
where 𝑒̂𝑖 and 𝑒𝑖 represent the estimated and true energy consumption
of appliance 𝑖 in a day, respectively. The difference between 𝑒𝑖 and 𝑟𝑖
is that the former denotes the energy consumption of appliance 𝑖 in the
whole test period, while the latter represents the energy consumption
of appliance 𝑖 per day. 𝐷 denotes the total number of days in the test
data.
In addition to these three measures, we introduce a new one, and we
name it the Overall Disaggregation Proportion Error (ODPE). It reflects
the long-term disaggregation error of each type of electrical appliance
from the perspective of load ratio, taking into account the proportion
of electricity consumed by each appliance:
|̂𝑟 − 𝑟 |
𝑂𝐷𝑃 𝐸 = ∑𝑖 𝑁 𝑖 ∗ 100%, (8)
𝑖=1 𝑟𝑖
∑
where 𝑁 𝑖=1 𝑟𝑖 is the total number of samples of the aggregate metered
energy consumption in the testing period. ODEP focuses on the esti-
mated error of the proportion of electricity consumed by each type of
appliance relative to the total electricity consumed.
5.3. Settings for training neural networks
A fixed-length window, which is set as 599, is used for the input data
and is shown in Fig. 2. Furthermore, each window’s data is created by
sliding a window one time step [45], that is, each subsequent window
is shifted from one sample to the next one. The procedure of a sliding
window is depicted in Fig. 5, where 𝐿 denotes the number of samples of
the data set. Samples are chosen at random from all the samples listed
in Table 2 to make up the training, validation and testing sets with a
60%–20%–20% ratio.

5
D. Li et al.
Fig. 5. The process of data generation.
Table 3
Hyper-parameters for training.
Pretrain
Input window size (sequence length) 599
Number of maximal epochs 300
Batch size 1024
Learning rate 1e−2
Retrain of the last two Dense layers
Batch size 1024
Number of maximal epochs 50
Learning rate 1e−2
Fine-tune of the first four CNN layers
Batch size 1024
Number of maximal epochs 20
Learning rate 1e−4
The first four CNN layers are kept unchanged to enable transfer
learning, and the last two dense layers are fine-tuned when applied
to the target domain. There are five steps in the process of transfer
learning. (1) Obtain the pre-trained model, and to be consistent with
the state-of-the-art research, the REFIT data set was chosen as the
source domain as per [28]. (2) Create the base model with the same first
four CNN layers as the pre-trained model. The output number is set as
the total number of appliances in each target house in the experiments.
(3) Keep the CNN layers in the pre-trained model fixed, and add two
trainable dense layers, and train them using target domain data (5)
Fine-tune the first four layers at a very low learning rate, which is set
to 1e−4 in our experiment.
Four groups of experiments were conducted. In the first experiment
(Case i), the performances of the traditional one-to-one model [28] and
the one-to-many model proposed in this paper are compared based on
the REFIT dataset. In the second and third experiments (Case ii and
Case iii), the performances of the one-to-one transferred model [28]
and the proposed one-to-many transferred model in this paper are
compared. In these two sets of experiments, model was trained on the
REFIT dataset and tested on REDD houses 2, 5 and UK-DALE houses 3,
4, respectively, to verify the generalization of the proposed model and
compare it with the state-of-the-art method. In the fourth experiment iv
(Case iv), the traditional one-to-one model [28] and the proposed one-
to-many model are applied to our own recorded SC-EDNRR dataset to
verify the accuracy of the proposed method.
In all simulations we use the data described in Table 2 and network
setting as shown in Table 3.
5.4. Results
We compare our results with the results achieved by the state-of-
the-art one-to-one seq2point transfer learning method of [28], which
were taken from [28] for (Case i–iii).
Table 4 shows the results for estimating five appliances with the
one-to-one model of [28] and the proposed one-to-many model on the
REFIT dataset, which is the most challenging dataset of the three con-
sidered. It can be seen that a lower SAE for Microwave and Kettle are
obtained by the one-to-one model, while lower SAE for Fridge, Washing
6
Applied Energy 329 (2023) 120223
machine, and Dishwasher is obtained using the one-to-many model.
For EpD, it can be found that two appliances perform better when
using the one-to-one transfer model, and three appliances perform
better when using the one-to-many transfer strategy. In terms of NDE,
three appliances have lower NDE when using the one-to-one transfer
model, one appliances perform better when using the one-to-many
transfer strategy, and one appliance, Dishwasher, has the same NDE
when using the two models. While using the proposed one-to-many
transfer strategy has a higher NDE, the average values of SAE and EpD
are lower, demonstrating that although the variance of decomposition
results using the proposed one-to-many transfer strategy is slightly
larger than that of the one-to-one transfer model, the average results of
the whole are better. Fig. 6 is an example of the disaggregation curve
for the Fridge using the proposed one-to-many model. It can be verified
from the figure that the estimated trace accurately follows the ground
truth curve. The ODPE values are less than 2 for all appliances except
for the washing machine, which means the disaggregation ratio error of
all appliances is less than 2%. The results indicate that the one-to-many
model is competitive and performs very well when trained and tested
on the same dataset.
Tables 5 and 6 show the results of domain transfer learning, where
the models are pre-trained on the REFIT dataset, and tested on REDD
and UK-DALE, respectively. For the REDD dataset, the SAE values of
Fridge and Washing machine using the proposed one-to-many transfer
model are lower than that of the one-to-one model, while the SAE
values for two other appliances are higher. Similarly, two appliances
and three appliances perform better in the metrics of EpD and NDE
respectively using the proposed one-to-many transfer model. The ODPE
values of all the appliances using the proposed model are lower than
7, indicating that the disaggregation percentage errors of all appliances
are less than 7%. Fig. 10 shows the proportion of electricity consumed
by each appliance (actual and estimated) in the REDD dataset. Figs. 7,
8, and 9 plot an example of the disaggregation curves for Microwave,
WashingMachine, and Dishwasher in REDD dataset, respectively, using
the proposed transferred one-to-many model. It can be seen from the
figures that the disaggregation of each appliance estimates well the
trend of the true electricity consumption.
For the UK-DALE dataset, the SAE values for the Fridge, Dishwasher,
and Washing machine using the proposed one-to-many transfer model
are lower than that of the one-to-one model. Similarly, four appliances
and three appliances, the majority of all devices, perform better on
the EpD and NDE metrics respectively using the proposed one-to-many
transfer model. The ODPE of all the appliances using the proposed
model are all lower than 4, indicating at most 4% of disaggregation
error. Fig. 11 shows the proportion of electricity consumed by each ap-
pliance in the UK-DALE dataset, actual and estimated, showing that the
proposed method can accurately estimate appliance consumption pro-
viding competitive performance to the more complex state-of-the-art
method of [28].
In summary, the results show that disaggregating all appliances at
once using a simple transferring one-to-many NILM model improves
effectiveness and practicality without sacrificing accuracy. The reason
behind this is that we add fine-tune to the first four CNN layers that are
used to learn low-level features, to overcome the difference between
source and target domain data [46].
To verify the universality and practicality of the proposed method,
we tested the model on the SC-ENDRR dataset, after pre-training the
model on REFIT. Table 7 shows the results of the benchmark model and
the proposed model in terms of various performance metrics including
SAE, NDE, EpD and ODPE. It can be seen that the proposed one-to-
many model performs better for most appliances. Indeed, the SAE, NDE,
EpD, and ODPE values of Freezer, Fridge, Air. C (Air Conditioner) and
Server are all lower with the proposed method. The explanation is that,
the load characteristics and the electricity usage of this dataset are
somewhat different from those of the training dataset. Therefore, it is
not enough to train the dense layer only, it is more important to do
D. Li et al. Applied Energy 329 (2023) 120223

Fig. 6. Disaggregation for Fridge using One-to-many model trained on REFIT and tested on REFIT.

Fig. 7. Disaggregation for Microwave using Proposed Transferred One-to-many model trained on REFIT and tested on REDD House2.

Fig. 8. Disaggregation for WashingMachine Using Proposed Transferred One-to-many model trained on REFIT and tested on REDD House1.

Fig. 9. Disaggregation for Dishwasher using Proposed Transferred One-to-many model trained on REFIT and tested on REDD House1.

7
D. Li et al. Applied Energy 329 (2023) 120223

Table 4
Disaggregation performance comparison of SAE, EpD(Wh), NDE, and ODPE(%) evaluation metrics of one-to-one model and
one-to-many model (Case i).
Method Trained on REFIT Trained on REFIT
Tested on REFIT Tested on REFIT
(Benchmark: one-to-one model) (one-to-many model)
SAE EpD NDE SAE EpD NDE ODPE
Microwave 0.05 96.04 0.20 0.13 191.91 0.94 1.03
Fridge 0.44 270.48 0.45 0.07 133.40 0.31 0.80
Washing m. 2.61 319.11 0.54 0.62 151.56 0.83 3.67
Dishwasher 0.61 206.15 0.49 0.07 40.20 0.49 0.45
Kettle 0.05 96.04 0.20 0.13 189.12 0.51 1.24
Mean 0.75 197.56 0.37 0.17 141.23 0.61 1.43
Std 1.06 100.96 0.16 0.17 61.71 0.26 1.28

Table 5
Disaggregation performance comparison of SAE, EpD (Wh), NDE, and ODPE (%) evaluation metrics of transfer learning experiments, where the
models are trained on REFIT and tested on REDD data set (Case ii).
Method CNN trained on REFIT Pre-trained on REFIT
Dense layers trained on REDD Dense layers trained on REDD
Tested on REDD CNN fine-tuned on REDD
(Benchmark: one-to-one transfer model) Tested on REDD House 2
(The proposed model)
SAE EpD NDE SAE EpD NDE ODPE
Microwave 0.023 247.57 0.68 0.241 200.33 0.54 3.98
Fridge 0.057 118.02 0.29 0.033 128.79 0.17 6.46
Dishwasher 0.007 274.62 0.35 0.729 78.06 0.69 3.20
Washing.m 0.128 181.31 0.19 0.025 1.87 0.09 0.07
Mean 0.054 205.38 0.37 0.257 102.26 0.37 3.43
Std 0.053 70.20 0.21 0.330 83.63 0.28 2.63

Table 6
Disaggregation performance comparison of SAE, EpD (Wh), NDE, and ODPE (%) evaluation metrics of transfer learning experiments, where the
models are trained on REFIT and tested on UK-DALE data set (Case iii).
Method CNN trained on REFIT Pre-trained on REFIT
Dense layers trained on UK-DALE Dense layers trained on UK-DALE
Tested on UK-DALE CNN fine-tuned on UK-DALE
(Benchmark: one-to-one transfer model) Tested on UK-DALE
(The proposed model)
SAE EpD NDE SAE EpD NDE ODPE
Fridge 0.266 297.75 0.51 0.080 61.34 0.28 3.19
Dishwasher 0.610 206.15 0.49 0.066 40.20 0.49 0.45
Washing.m 0.899 329.83 1.19 0.580 55.74 0.79 2.47
Kettle 0.043 72.92 0.21 0.603 48.69 1.06 2.07
Mean 0.454 226.66 0.60 0.332 51.49 0.65 2.04
Std 0.377 115.11 0.41 0.299 9.13 0.34 1.15

Table 7
Disaggregation performance comparison of SAE, EpD (Wh), NDE, and ODPE (%) evaluation metrics of transfer learning experiments, where the models are trained on REFIT and
tested on our practical SC-ENDRR dataset (Case iv).
Method Pre-trained on REFIT Pre-trained on REFIT
Dense layers trained on SC-EDNRR Dense layers trained on SC-EDNRR
Tested on SC-EDNRR CNN fine-tuned on SC-EDNRR
(Benchmark: one-to-one transfer model) Tested on SC-EDNRR
(the proposed model)
SAE EpD NDE ODPE SAE EpD NDE ODPE
Freezer 0.096 280.58 0.092 2.533 0.005 18.87 0.0001 0.30
Fridge 0.111 47.52 0.173 1.21 0.027 13.90 0.0840 0.30
Washing.m 0.003 0.38 0.001 0.003 0.223 27.95 0.1660 0.56
Air c. 0.932 136.39 0.985 3.79 0.639 77.82 0.4425 1.48
CAC 0.027 0.31 0.007 0.017 0.061 8.09 0.0050 0.18
Server 0.088 20.08 0.215 0.336 0.005 5.83 0.0005 0.05
Mean 0.209 80.87 0.245 1.314 0.160 25.41 0.1163 0.47
Std 0.325 100.61 0.339 1.413 0.248 26.87 0.1727 0.51

the fine-tuning of the CNN layers, which is used for feature extraction,
to further improve its performance. Fig. 12 depicts disaggregation pie
charts for each of the six appliances. All the ODPE values are under
2, which means the disaggregation percentage error of all appliances
is less than 2%. This chart shows that the model pre-trained by the
public dataset can be used for a pre-training model for our specific
use, providing a reasonable strategy for disaggregation. In general, the
results suggest that the proposed transfer one-to-many model proposed
in this paper is suitable for both public dataset and self-collected
dataset, and has good practical value.
Furthermore, the total number of learnable parameters for these
networks are shown in Table 8. It can be seen the proposed method has

8
D. Li et al. Applied Energy 329 (2023) 120223

Table A.1
The description of the data sets used in the additional experiments of this work. K:
Thousand.
Dataset House Samples (K)
Pre-training REDD 2 252.9
Fine-tuning REFIT 20 239.5
Testing REFIT 20 59.9

much fewer parameters to learn, which means the proposed method

is easier to implement in practice and requires fewer computational
resources to train the models.

6. Conclusion
Fig. 10. The proportion of electricity consumed by each electrical appliance in the
REDD dataset. A. The actual energy consumed; B. The NILM result using the proposed
transferred one-to-many model. The CNN layers trained on the REFIT dataset were
fixed, then the dense layers were retrained and CNN fine-tuned on the REDD dataset. In this paper, we propose a one-to-many model and a transfer one-
to-many model for multi-target energy disaggregation to improve the
effectiveness and practicality of NILM. The proposed transfer strategy
for multi-targets NILM can achieve promising results using a single
model and limited measurements, according to experimental results
on four public datasets and our practical collected data, using four
different metrics. The intuition behind the proposed method is that
adding a fine-tuning process for the target source can help improve the
model’s performance. In future research, more attempts will be made to
further reduce training data and avoid prior installation of sub-meters
on electrical appliances.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Dandan Li: Methodology, Data curation, Software, Writing – origi-

Fig. 11. The proportion of electricity consumed by each electrical appliance in the UK-
DALE dataset. A. The actual energy consumed; B. The NILM result using the proposed
transferred one-to-many model. The CNN layers trained on the REFIT data were fixed,
then the dense layers were retrained and CNN fine-tuned on the UK-DALE dataset.
nal draft. Jiangfeng Li: Writing – review & editing. Xin Zeng: Valida-
tion, Writing – review & editing. Vladimir Stankovic: Data curation,
Reviewing and editing. Lina Stankovic: Data curation, Reviewing and
editing. Changjiang Xiao: Conceptualization, Writing – review & edit-
ing. Qingjiang Shi: Writing – review & editing, Funding acquisition,
Supervision.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-

cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
influence the work reported in this paper.

Data availability
Fig. 12. The proportion of electricity consumed by each electrical appliance in the
our own collected data set. A. The actual energy consumed; B. The NILM result using
the proposed transferred one-to-many model. The CNN trained on the REFIT data were Data will be made available on request.
fixed, then the dense layers were retrained and CNN fine-tuned on the our own collected
data set: SC-EDNRR.

Acknowledgments
Table 8
The number of parameters to be optimized in total with the proposed method in this
work and the benchmark. All numbers are in thousand (K) and 𝑁 denotes the number This work was supported in part by the National Key Research and
of appliances.
Development Program, China (No. 2017YFE0119300), the National Na-
Method Pre-training Fine-tuning
ture Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Program (Nos. 62231019 and
Total (K) Frozen (K) Training (K)
42001372), Shanghai Sailing Program (No. 19YF1451500), and China
Proposed 203.33 11.58 191.74
Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Nos. 2019M661621 and
Benchmark [28] 30708.25 ∗ 𝑁 38.43 ∗ 𝑁 30669.82 ∗ 𝑁
2021T140513). It was also partially supported by the European Union’s
Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie
Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 734331.

9
D. Li et al. Applied Energy 329 (2023) 120223

Table A.2
Disaggregation performance comparison of SAE, EpD (Wh), NDE, and ODPE (%) evaluation metrics of one-to-one model and one-to-many model,
where the models are trained on REDD and tested on REDD.
Method Trained on REDD Trained on REDD
Tested on REDD Tested on REDD
(Benchmark: one-to-one model) (one-to-many model)
SAE EpD NDE ODPE SAE EpD NDE ODPE
Microwave 0.073 43.84 0.05 0.63 0.113 79.45 0.27 6.17
Fridge 0.086 178.47 0.12 3.29 0.202 378.95 0.16 5.74
Dishwasher 0.758 126.01 0.52 2.73 0.539 91.37 0.34 1.44
Washing.m 0.035 1.41 0.09 0.03 0.008 2.95 0.11 1.33
Mean 0.238 87.43 0.19 1.67 0.215 138.18 0.22 3.67
Std 0.301 69.05 0.18 1.37 0.198 143.08 0.09 2.29

Table A.3
Disaggregation performance comparison of SAE, EpD (Wh), NDE, and ODPE (%) evaluation metrics of transfer learning experiments, where the
models are trained on REDD and tested on REFIT.
Method Pre-trained on REDD Pre-trained on REDD
Dense layers trained on REFIT Dense layers trained on REFIT
Tested on REFIT CNN fine-tuned on REFIT
(Benchmark: one-to-one transfer model) Tested on REFIT
(the proposed model)
SAE EpD NDE ODPE SAE EpD NDE ODPE
Microwave 0.188 120.08 0.91 0.83 0.544 201.90 1.03 4.61
Fridge 0.224 197.56 0.59 1.72 0.128 125.51 0.38 3.22
Dishwasher 0.079 31.10 0.62 0.25 0.236 32.47 0.52 0.06
Washing.m 0.43 157.76 0.93 1.57 0.271 139.08 0.91 0.27
Mean 0.23 127.12 0.76 1.09 0.294 124.74 0.71 2.04
Std 0.127 60.80 0.15 0.59 0.153 60.56 0.26 1.93

Appendix A. Supplemental description for CNN layers of the
model in Fig. 2
As described in Section 4.1, the 𝜏th input window can be repre-
sented as 𝑦𝜏 . Four CNN layers are used in the proposed model. The
output of the 𝑐th convolution layer, at time stamp 𝑡 is:
∑
𝑦𝑐𝑡 = 𝑦𝑡+𝑘 𝑤𝑐 + 𝑏𝑐 , (9)
∀𝑘
where 𝑘 is the length of the receptive field, 𝑤𝑐 and 𝑏𝑐 , are the weights
and bias, respectively, and 𝑦𝑐𝑡 denotes the output of the layer. Note that
dimensions of the vectors 𝑦𝑐𝑡 , 𝑤𝑐 and 𝑏𝑐 would differ from layer to layer.
After performing the convolution operations, the output is flattened,
i.e., reshaped into a column vector, and then a dense layer is applied:
𝑦𝑑𝑡 = 𝑤𝑑 𝑦𝑐𝑡 + 𝑏𝑑 ,
where 𝑤𝑑 and 𝑏𝑑 represents the weight and bias in the dense layer,
respectively. Finally, the output layer receives the input from the dense
layer and outputs:
𝑥̂ (𝑖) 𝑑
𝑡 = 𝑤𝑜 𝑦𝑡 + 𝑏𝑜 ,
where 𝑤𝑜 and 𝑏𝑜 represents the weight and bias, respectively. is𝑥̂ (𝑖)
the output of the dense layer, and since this is a regression network,
represents estimated electric consumption of appliance 𝑖.
Note that all weights and bias vectors are parameters to be learned
via backpropagation. To obtain these parameters, 𝜃 = [𝑤𝑐 , 𝑏𝑐 , 𝑤𝑑 , 𝑏𝑑 , 𝑤𝑜 ,
𝑏𝑜 ], a mean square error loss function is set as follows:
1 1 ∑ ∑ (𝑖)
𝑇 𝑁
𝐿(𝑥|𝑓 (𝑦, 𝜃)) = (𝑥 − 𝑓 (𝑖) (𝑦𝜏 , 𝜃))2 ,
𝑇 𝑁 𝜏=1 𝑖=1 𝑡0
where 𝑥𝑡(𝑖) represents the true consumption of appliance 𝑖 at time 𝑡0 ,
0
𝑓 (𝑖) (𝑦𝜏 , 𝜃) the estimated consumption of appliance 𝑖 at time 𝑡0 , and 𝑡0
the midpoint of each time window 𝜏.
of electricity consumed by each appliance, and the estimated error of
proportion of electricity consumed by each type of appliance relative
to the total electricity consumed. On this basis, we proposed the metric
|̂𝑟 −𝑟 |
of Overall Disaggregation Proportion Error (ODPE), 𝑂𝐷𝑃 𝐸 = ∑𝑖𝑁 𝑖 ∗
𝑖=1 𝑟𝑖
100%, (i.e., the Eq. (8) in Section 5.2). The SAE and ODPE have a similar
form, however, they measure different aspects for energy estimation.
The former measures the error of an appliance’s consumption relative
to its true value, while the latter measures the error relative to the sum
true value of all the appliances. The latter calculates a percentage for
each appliance, which can reflect the overall disaggregation proportion
error.
For example, suppose there are 4 appliances in a room, TV, lighting,
fridge and washing machine (WM). If the aggregated energy con-
sumption in a certain period (2 days, which will be used for the
(10) calculation of EpD) is 300 Wh, the real energy consumptions are 40 Wh,
50 Wh, 90 Wh and 120 Wh, for the four appliances, respectively.
Noise is neglected in this toy example. Suppose the estimated energy
consumptions of the four appliances are 32 Wh, 55 Wh, 109 Wh, and
130 Wh respectively (the summation of the estimated consumption
(11) may not be equal to 300 Wh). Thus, it can be calculated that the
2
NDE of TV is 𝑁𝐷𝐸𝑇 𝑉 = (40 Wh−32 2Wh) = 0.40, the SAE of TV is
𝑡 (40 Wh)
𝑆𝐴𝐸𝑇 𝑉 = |40 Wh−32
40 Wh
Wh|
= 0.20, and the EpD of TV is 𝐸𝑝𝐷𝑇 𝑉 =
1
2
|40 Wh − 32 Wh| = 4.00 Wh. It can be seen that although the disag-
gregation results have been evaluated from several perspectives for the
TV, it lacks a metric that measures percentage of electricity consumed
by the TV relative to the whole. This may be useful in many scenarios,
such as estimating energy bill for each appliance, or estimating the
(12) proportion of electrical appliances consumed over a longer period of
time. ODPE is proposed to address this issue. The ODPE of TV is
𝑂𝐷𝑃 𝐸𝑇 𝑉 = |40 Wh−32
300 Wh
Wh|
∗ 100% = 2.66%.
Appendix C. Additional experiments

Appendix B. More detail for the metric of ODPE To demonstrate cross-domain transfer learning, an additional exper-
iment, where the model is trained on REDD data set and tested on both
In the field of NILM, the aim is to disaggregate the electricity con- REDD and REFIT datasets, was conducted. The description of the data
sumption of each appliance, thus, it is helpful to understand proportion sets used in this experiment is shown in Table A.1. Table A.2 shows the

10
D. Li et al.
disaggregation performance comparison using SAE, EpD (Wh), NDE,
and ODPE evaluation metrics between the one-to-one model and the
proposed one-to-many model. One can see that the one-to-one model
performs only slightly better than the one-to-many model, while in
Table A.3, the one-to-many transfer model performs better on the dis-
aggregation of Fridge, Dishwasher, and Washing machine. The results
show that the proposed transfer learning strategy with fine-tuning its
feature extraction layers, i.e., the CNN layers, can perform as good as
(and often better than) the one-to-one transfer model, which requires
one model for each appliance and more parameters for each model, is
hence computationally more intensive.
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