On the Regularization Parameter Selection for Sparse Code Learning in Electrical Source Separation

Source separation of whole-home electrical consumption also known as energy disaggregation plays a crucial role in energy savings and sustainable development. One important approach towards accurate energy disaggregation is based on sparse code learning. The sparsity-based source separation algorithms allow to build models that explicitly generalize across multiple different devices of the same category. While this method has recently been investigated, yet the importance of the degree of sparseness given by the regularization parameter is rarely considered. In this paper we aim at investigating the performance of learning representations from the aggregated electrical load signal with sparse models for energy disaggregation. In particular we focus our study on the influence of the regularization parameter in the overall approach. The computational experiments yielded in real data from home electrical energy consumption show that for several degrees of sparseness a reliable scheme for energy disaggregation can be obtained with statistical significance.