Unseen Appliances Identification

We assess the feasibility of unseen appliance recognition through the analysis of their electrical signatures recorded using lowcost smart plugs. By unseen, we stress that our approach focuses on the identification of appliances that are of different brands or models than the one in training phase. We follow a strictly defined protocol in order to provide comparable results to the scientific community. We first evaluate the drop of performance when going from seen to unseen appliances. We then analyze the results of different machine learning algorithms, as the k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). Several tunings allow us to achieve 74% correct accuracy using GMMs which is our current best system.