# Benchmarking Active Learning for NILM

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.15805 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15805/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [Deep Bayesian Active Learning with Image Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02910/) (2017)
- [BatchBALD: Efficient and Diverse Batch Acquisition for Deep Bayesian Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08158/) (2019)
- [Neural NILM: Deep Neural Networks Applied to Energy Disaggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.06594/) (2015)
- [Sequence-to-point learning with neural networks for nonintrusive load monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.09106/) (2016)
- [Dropout-based Active Learning for Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09856/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning Based Energy Disaggregation and On/Off Detection of Household Appliances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00941/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ReCo: When to Relocate Sensor Kits under Deployment Constraints -- A NILM Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35075/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) focuses on disaggregating total household power consumption into appliance-specific usage. Many advanced NILM methods are based on neural networks that typically require substantial amounts of labeled appliance data, which can be challenging and costly to collect in real-world settings. We hypothesize that appliance data from all households does not uniformly contribute to NILM model improvements. Thus, we propose an active learning approach to selectively install appliance monitors in a limited number of houses. This work is the first to benchmark the use of active learning for strategically selecting appliance-level data to optimize NILM performance. We first develop uncertainty-aware neural networks for NILM and then install sensors in homes where disaggregation uncertainty is highest. Benchmarking our method on the publicly available Pecan Street Dataport dataset, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms a standard random baseline and achieves performance comparable to models trained on the entire dataset. Using this approach, we achieve comparable NILM accuracy with approximately 30% of the data, and for a fixed number of sensors, we observe up to a 2x reduction in disaggregation errors compared to random sampling.