Extraction of basic patterns of household energy consumption

Solar power, wind power, and co-generation (combined heat and power) systems are possible candidate for household power generation. These systems have their advantages and disadvantages. To propose the optimal combination of the power generation systems, the extraction of basic patterns of energy consumption of the house is required. In this study, energy consumption patterns are modeled by mixtures of Gaussian distributions. Then, using the symmetrized Kullback-Leibler divergence as a distance measure of the distributions, the basic pattern of energy consumption is extracted by means of hierarchical clustering. By an experiment using the Annex 42 dataset, it is shown that the proposed method is able to extract typical energy consumption patterns.