# ADF & TransApp: A Transformer-Based Framework for Appliance Detection Using Smart Meter Consumption Series

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05381 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05381/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12740/) (2022)
- [Network In Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4400/) (2013)
- [Deep learning for time series classification: a review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04356/) (2018)
- [CoAtNet: Marrying Convolution and Attention for All Data Sizes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04803/) (2021)
- [An Introduction to Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08458/) (2015)
- [A Transformer-based Framework for Multivariate Time Series Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02803/) (2020)
- [InceptionTime: Finding AlexNet for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04939/) (2019)
- [Time Series Classification from Scratch with Deep Neural Networks: A Strong Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06455/) (2016)
- [ROCKET: Exceptionally fast and accurate time series classification using random convolutional kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13051/) (2019)
- [SAITS: Self-Attention-based Imputation for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08516/) (2022)
- [HIVE-COTE 2.0: a new meta ensemble for time series classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07551/) (2021)
- [The Great Time Series Classification Bake Off: An Experimental Evaluation of Recently Proposed Algorithms. Extended Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01711/) (2016)
- [dCAM: Dimension-wise Class Activation Map for Explaining Multivariate Data Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12165/) (2022)
- [Towards trustworthy Energy Disaggregation: A review of challenges, methods and perspectives for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02009/) (2022)
- [Appliance Detection Using Very Low-Frequency Smart Meter Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10352/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning for Appliance Recognition: A Comparison to Classical Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03759/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [NILMFormer: Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring that Accounts for Non-Stationarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05880/) (2025)
- [Few Labels are all you need: A Weakly Supervised Framework for Appliance Localization in Smart-Meter Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05895/) (2025)
- [DeviceScope: An Interactive App to Detect and Localize Appliance Patterns in Electricity Consumption Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05912/) (2025)
- [LoaDiff: Conditional Generation of Electricity Consumption Time Series for Energy Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11639/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Over the past decade, millions of smart meters have been installed by electricity suppliers worldwide, allowing them to collect a large amount of electricity consumption data, albeit sampled at a low frequency (one point every 30min). One of the important challenges these suppliers face is how to utilize these data to detect the presence/absence of different appliances in the customers' households. This valuable information can help them provide personalized offers and recommendations to help customers towards the energy transition. Appliance detection can be cast as a time series classification problem. However, the large amount of data combined with the long and variable length of the consumption series pose challenges when training a classifier. In this paper, we propose ADF, a framework that uses subsequences of a client consumption series to detect the presence/absence of appliances. We also introduce TransApp, a Transformer-based time series classifier that is first pretrained in a self-supervised way to enhance its performance on appliance detection tasks. We test our approach on two real datasets, including a publicly available one. The experimental results with two large real datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms current solutions, including state-of-the-art time series classifiers applied to appliance detection. This paper appeared in VLDB 2024.