Multi-scale Re-weighted Attention Feature Fusion for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

Abstract

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) addresses the challenge of disaggregating total energy consumption into individual appliance usage, which is essential for enhancing energy efficiency and managing smart grids. Existing methods often overlook the impact of window sizes on the separation of appliance-level power signals, leading to appliance power aliasing (APA), where a single total power curve corresponds to multiple operating conditions and appliance couplings. A larger window captures global features noise, but it also exacerbates APA, thereby enlarging the solution space. In contrast, a smaller window mitigates APA but it introduces noise and increases complexity. To address these limitations, we propose the Multi-Scale Re-weighted Attention Feature Fusion (MRAFF) model, which employs a multi-scale framework to manage temporal variations and incorporates a re-weighted attention module to enhance multi-scale interactions, thereby improving feature representation. Experimental results demonstrate that our MRAFF model significantly outperforms baseline models on the REDD and UK-DALE datasets, achieving improvements ranging from 2.27% to 10.5% in MAE and from 33.74% to 58.34% in SAE.