A temporal-spatial graph network with a learnable adjacency matrix for appliance-level electricity consumption prediction

Predicting the electricity consumption of individual appliances, known as appliance-level energy consumption (ALEC) prediction, is essential for effective energy management and conservation. Despite its importance, research in this area is limited and faces several challenges: 1) The correlation between the usage of different appliances has rarely been considered for ALEC prediction. 2) A learnable strategy for obtaining the optimal correlation between different appliance behaviors is lacking. 3) It is difficult to accurately quantify the usage relationship among different appliances. To address these issues, we propose a graph-based temporal-spatial network that employs a learnable adjacency matrix for appliance-level load prediction in this work. The network comprises a temporal graph convolutional network (TGCN) and a learnable adjacency matrix that enables us to utilize correlations between appliances and quantify their relationships. To validate our approach, we compared our model with six others: a TGCN model with a fixed adjacency matrix where all elements are set to 0; a TGCN model with a fixed adjacency matrix where all elements are set to 0.5, except for the diagonal; a TGCN model with a randomly generated adjacency matrix, except for the diagonal; an AugLSTM model; a model with ResNetPlus architecture; and a feed-forward deep neural network. Five houses in four datasets: AMPDs, REFIT, UK-DALE, and SC-EDNRR are utilized. The metrics used in this study include Root Mean Square Error, Explained Variance score, Mean Absolute Error, F-norm and Coefficient of Determination. Our experiments have validated the accuracy and practicality of our proposed approach across different datasets.