IEEE CANADIAN JOURNAL OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING, VOL. 44, NO.

1, WINTER 2021 41

Evaluation of Dimensionality Reduction

Techniques for Load Profiling Application
in Smart Grid Environment
Évaluation des techniques de réduction de la
dimensionnalité pour l’application de profilage de
charge dans l’environnement d’un réseau intelligent
Ahmed Aleshinloye, Muhammad Asif Manzoor, and Abdul Bais , Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract— The traditional power grid system is evolving toward a smart grid system, which will improve the
user experience. However, this system is capable of generating high-dimensional data at a very high sample
rate. A common technique for reducing high-dimensional data is dimensionality reduction. With this technique,
we are able to reduce the data to a lower dimension, making it suitable for smart grid applications including
transmission, storage, and visualization. Linear dimensionality reduction techniques are mostly explored in
the context of smart grid applications. Due to the nonlinear nature of data generation in the smart grid,
we anticipate that the nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques can perform better. This work evaluates
different nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques and compares them with principal component analysis,
which is a widely used linear dimensionality reduction technique in the smart grid environment. We use the
visualization of load profile data and adjusted rank index (ARI) for comparison of dimensionality reduction
techniques. Load profiling is an important task to complement the demand-side management and tariff selection.
The visual depiction of the load profiles and ARI suggest that the nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques
perform better compared with linear dimensionality reduction techniques.
Résumé— Le système de réseau électrique traditionnel évolue vers un système de réseau intelligent, qui
améliorera l’expérience utilisateur. Cependant, ce système est capable de générer des données de grande
dimension à une fréquence d’échantillonnage très élevée. Une technique courante pour réduire les données de
grande dimension est la réduction de la dimensionnalité. Avec cette technique, nous sommes en mesure de réduire
les données à une dimension inférieure, ce qui la rend adaptée aux applications pour des réseaux intelligents
incluant la transmission, le stockage et la visualisation. Les techniques de réduction de la dimensionnalité
linéaire sont principalement explorées dans le contexte des applications au réseau intelligent. En raison de la
nature non-linéaire de la génération de données dans le réseau intelligent, nous prévoyons que les techniques de
réduction de la dimensionnalité non-linéaire peuvent mieux fonctionner. Ce travail évalue différentes techniques
de réduction de la dimensionnalité non-linéaire et les compare avec l’analyse en composantes principales, qui
est une technique de réduction de dimensionnalité linéaire largement utilisée dans l’environnement d’un réseau
intelligent. Nous utilisons la visualisation des données de profil de charge et l’indice de rang ajusté (ARI) pour
comparer les techniques de réduction de la dimensionnalité. Le profil de charge est une tâche importante pour
compléter la gestion de la demande et la sélection tarifaire. La représentation visuelle des profils de charge et
ARI suggère que les techniques de réduction de la dimensionnalité non-linéaire fonctionnent mieux par rapport
aux techniques de réduction de la dimensionnalité linéaire.
Index Terms— Clustering, dimension reduction, load profiling, smart grid, visualization.

I. I NTRODUCTION control, optimization, and simulation, and are becoming com-

W ITH the emergence of the smart grid, the number of
intelligent devices (sensors, meters, and so on) are
increasing and the models, which are used to perform analysis,
Manuscript received March 22, 2019; revised November 4, 2019,
January 10, 2020, and May 19, 2020; accepted August 16, 2020. Date of
current version February 17, 2021. This work was supported by the University
of Regina’s SaskPower Clean Energy Research Grant entitled An Application
Framework for Real-time Streaming Big Data Analysis. (Corresponding
author: Abdul Bais.)
The authors are with the Electronic Systems Engineering Program,
Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Regina, Regina,
SK S4S 0A2, Canada (e-mail: abdul.bais@uregina.ca).
Associate Editor managing this article’s review: Bhavesh Bhalja.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ICJECE.2020.3018433
2694-1783 © 2021 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
plex and computationally expensive. The intelligent devices
are expected to generate a high volume of data at a high
rate, which must be collected and analyzed in real time to
utilize the resources more efficiently and for better demand-
side management. It is estimated that the smart meter readings
will increase from 24 to 220 million per day for a large utility
company when advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is
fully integrated into the smart grid [1]. There were 70.8 million
AMI installations in the U.S. at the end of 2016 [2]. The data
volume, for 70.8 million metering devices in a year, is shown
in Table I. The AMI data are assumed to use a 128-bit data
size representing 8 bytes of numerical data and 8 bytes of

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42 IEEE CANADIAN JOURNAL OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING, VOL. 44, NO. 1, WINTER 2021
TABLE I
D ATA G ROWTH C OLLECTED FOR O NE M ILLION
M ETERING D EVICES IN A Y EAR
metadata [3]. The table shows the increase in AMI data with
an increasing sampling frequency. At a sampling frequency
of 15 min, the total data recorded is 2.48 trillion with a
data size of 39.69 TB in a single year. The number of smart
meters is also increasing in addition to increasing the sampling
rate. Moreover, distributed energy storage and generation,
renewable energy sources, and other new technologies are
also being added to the energy grid at a rapid pace. This
phenomenon increases the complexity of an already complex
framework, requiring the need for intelligent management,
real-time processing, analysis, and visualization system.
In today’s electricity market, every energy supplier wants
to understand their customer’s consumption behavior cor-
rectly. This allows for the provision of affordable supply
to consumers and to earn a fair share of profit. Similarly,
customers need to know their consumption behavior in order
to purchase a suitable tariff plan or to successfully implement
energy efficiency measures. The classification of end-users
based on consumption behavior is fundamental to the success
of demand-side management. This process is a part of load
profiling and can be achieved through direct and indirect
clustering [4].
There are implementations of direct clustering using self-
organizing map (SOM), k-means, hierarchical clustering, and
fuzzy k-means [5]–[7]. Aside from the traditional clustering
methods, Chicco et al. [8] proposed an ant colony-based
algorithm to determine the users’ behavior. The algorithm is
evaluated using the fitness functions called clustering disper-
sion indicator and the scatter index. The results are shown to
outperform k-means clustering. Other methods of evaluating
clusters are the silhouette index, the Davies–Bouldin indicator,
and the similarity matrix indicator [9].
In indirect clustering, features for independent identically
distributed samples are extracted as input to the clustering
methods. The feature extraction is achieved using dimensional-
ity reduction and time-based techniques [4]. In dimensionality
reduction, the dimensions of the observation are reduced using
principal component analysis (PCA) [10], the Sammon map,
curvilinear component analysis [7], and autoencoders. In [11],
autoencoders are used to extract input features before applying
fuzzy k-means for clustering to the reduced representation of
the data. Considering the nature of smart meter data, time
series methods are also used to extract features. Zhong and
Tam [12] transformed smart meter data from the time domain
to the frequency domain before using a classification and
regression tree for load profiling. Verdu et al. [13] applied
SOM clustering to the frequency component of the smart
meter data. Altogether, an improvement of results is observed
when the data are in the frequency domain. Other time-based
techniques are discrete wavelet transform [14], hidden Markov
model [15], and singular value decomposition (SVD) [16].
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Linear dimensionality reduction techniques, such as PCA,
are mostly used for smart grid applications. The samples
are eigen decomposed resulting in the principal components.
These components are obtained by projecting the samples
on the basis of orthogonality. Due to linearly independent
principal components and removal of eigenvectors associated
with low eigenvalues, accurate reconstruction is inefficient.
These dimensionality reduction techniques place dissimilar
linear data points far apart in lower dimension representation
but fail at retaining the intrinsic shape of nonlinear samples
when mapped to a lower dimension. Moreover, due to their
linear nature, these techniques do not model the underlying
nonlinear complex relations. We have compared linear dimen-
sionality reduction techniques for demand-side management
in [17] where we concluded that PCA performs better in
comparison to other linear techniques. Due to the nonlinear
nature of the underlying process, we anticipate that nonlinear
approaches can be more effective to represent the data in
lower dimensions. The objective of this work is to analyze
and evaluate nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques.
As PCA outperforms other linear dimensionality reduction
techniques [17], we compare the results of our tested nonlinear
techniques with PCA to get a fair perspective. Clustering is
applied to dimensionally reduced data to generate load profiles.
Finally, graphs are created to visually depict the results of the
process for qualitative evaluation, and the adjusted rank index
(ARI) is computed to quantitatively evaluate the dimension
reduction techniques. Data visualization plays a key role in
smart grid data analytics and may also provide assistance to
operators in decision-making process. The proposed load pro-
filing method is based on nonlinear dimensionality reduction,
which helps in modeling the underlying nonlinear relations.
The proposed solution has better ARI and generates good
results in terms of human interpretation (visualization). The
proposed method (with t-SNE) clearly divides the different
users into different load profiles based on their usage.
The rest of this article is organized as follows. The data
sets used in this work are explained in Section II. Section III
discusses the methodology of this work. Section IV presents
the experimental results and discussion. This section also
incorporates the comparison of clustering techniques. This
article is concluded in Section V.
II. DATA
One of the major contributions of this work is to reduce
the dimensionality of smart meter data sets so that it can
be efficiently used in later stages. We use commercial and
residential hourly load profile for the TMY3 locations in the
United States to evaluate the performance of PCA and other
nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques [18]. The res-
idential data contain energy consumption for 3045 buildings,
while the commercial data contain energy consumption for
14976 buildings. For both data sets, the measurement is polled
at 1 sample/h for a year’s period. There are ten features
recorded in the case of commercial buildings (excluding
timestamp), whereas 13 parameters are recorded in the case of
residential buildings (excluding timestamps). The features of
the residential data are electricity (facility), gas (facility), heat-
ing (electricity), heating (gas), cooling (electricity), HVac fan
ALESHINLOYE et al.: EVALUATION OF DIMENSIONALITY REDUCTION TECHNIQUES FOR LOAD PROFILING APPLICATION
Fig. 1. Energy consumption of residential building for a two-day period
sampled at 1 sample/h.
(fans/electricity), HVac (electricity), fans (electricity), general
interior lights (electricity), general exterior lights (electricity),
appliance interior equipment (electricity), miscellaneous inte-
rior equipment (electricity), and water heater (water systems
and gas). Similarly, the ten features of the commercial data
are electricity (facility), fans (electricity), heating (electric-
ity), cooling (electricity), general interior lights (electricity),
interior equipment (electricity), gas (facility), heating (gas),
interior equipment (gas), and water heater (water systems and
gas). All measurements are aggregated on an hourly basis.
We use all the parameters except timestamps in the process
of dimensionality reduction. The output of each observation
is the timestamps and 2-D vector (reduced). The timestamps
are not considered for reduction because it is required in other
operations, e.g., billing.
The TMY3 data set has defined three categories for res-
idential load profile data and 16 categories for the com-
mercial load profile data. Each observation in the data set
is assigned to one of these categories. We use the same
categorization and divide buildings into the residential data
set into three classes based on their energy consumption,
i.e., low, base, or high [19]. A two-day energy consumption
profile is visualized in Fig. 1. The vertical axis shows the
hourly electricity utilization (kW), and the horizontal axis
shows the time. Similarly, each commercial building falls in
one of 16 classes representing midrise apartment, small hotel,
large hotel, stand-alone retail, outpatient health care, hospital,
secondary school, primary school, strip mall, supermarket,
quick service restaurant, full-service restaurant, warehouse,
large office, medium office, and small office [20]. The energy
consumption for a building in each of the 16 classes is shown
in Fig. 2. Due to differences in the utilization of different
commercial buildings, we plot the hourly electricity utilization
as natural logarithmic values. We also use different line
styles for plotting electricity consumption for each category in
addition to using a logarithmic scale for better interpretation.
In addition to the TMY3 data set, we also use the “Indi-
vidual household electric power consumption Data Set” [21]
to create load profiles for a single user based on seasonal
patterns as another use case. The data set contains smart meter
data for a single customer with the granularity of one minute.
The data are collected over a period of around four years.
Each observation in the data set consists of nine attributes,
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43
Fig. 2. Energy consumption of commercial building for a two-day period
sampled at 1 sample/h.
including timing information. They are global active power,
global reactive power, voltage, global intensity, submetering 1
(electrical equipment in the kitchen), submetering 2 (electrical
equipment in the laundry room), and submetering 3 (electric
water heater and air conditioner). The observations are accu-
mulated on a weekly basis, and these observations are used
in load profiling. The data set contains some missing values
(approximately 1.25%) that are filled by the average values of
the respective column. The data set is divided into four load
profiles based on seasons, i.e., spring, summer, autumn, and
winter.
III. M ETHODOLOGY
Visualization of data is important in data analysis as it
allows for the identification of outliers, observing clustered
data points, and determining the underlying structure of the
data. However, the increasing amount of metering and sensing
devices in the grid makes it difficult for industry profes-
sionals to visualize data in an intuitive manner. With the
aid of dimensionality reduction tools, data from the phasor
measurement unit (PMU), smart meters, and sensors can be
reduced to a 2-D or 3-D representation in real time for quick
visualization to aid the identification of anomalies or outliers
in the data. We have converted the multidimensional input
vector into a 2-D feature vector. The 2-D vector can easily
be plotted and visualized. Furthermore, it is easy to interpret
a 2-D plot and identify abnormal usage behaviors and out-
liers. These are the reasons to reduce the multidimensional
input vector into a 2-D vector. Hyndman et al. [22] applied
dimensionality reduction techniques to visualize smart meter
and PMU data for detecting users with abnormal consumption
patterns, identifying islanding event, postdisturbance voltage,
and visualizing probability forecast for renewable energy.
In this article, both linear and nonlinear dimensionality
reduction techniques are used to transform the input data
of dimension m to a reduced dimension k. Mathematically,
the input X ∈ Rn×m is reduced to Y ∈ Rn×k . In this article,
PCA is used for the linear reduction since it is shown to
outperform other linear reduction techniques in the smart
grid environment [17], while other nonlinear dimensionality
reduction techniques tested are Isometric Feature Mapping
(Isomap), kernel PCA (KPCA), locally linear embedding
(LLE), t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE),
autoencoders, and Laplacian eigenmaps.
Each technique is selected considering its performance in
other domains, e.g., Isomap is successfully applied to various
44 IEEE CANADIAN JOURNAL OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING, VOL. 44, NO. 1, WINTER 2021
Fig. 3. Flow diagram of the visualization process.
applications for example wood inspection [23], identification
of hepatic tumors [24], visualization of biomedical data [25],
and head pose estimation [26]. KPCA is applied to face
recognition [27], speech recognition [28], novelty detec-
tion [29], and smoke detection [30]. LLE is applied to super-
resolution [31] and sound source localization [32]. The Lapla-
cian eigenmaps are applied to clustering [33]–[35] and also
face recognition [36]. t-SNE is applied for the visualization of
handwritten digits and face data [37]. Autoencoder is applied
to image compression [38] and for the retrieval of medical
images using random projections as input features [39].
The flowchart of the proposed methodology is shown
in Fig. 3. The main steps are the following.
1) Dimension Reduction: One of the dimension reduction
technique is selected, and the input samples are mapped
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to a lower dimension in either parametric or nonpara-
metric way. The input multidimensional feature vectors
are reduced to 2-D feature vectors. We use a 2-D feature
vector to represent the data set since more than 90% of
the variance can be retained by a 2-D feature vector,
further discussed in Section IV.
2) Clustering: K-means clustering algorithm is applied to
the 2-D data set. The number of clusters is three in
the case of residential buildings, 16 in the case of
commercial buildings, and four in the case of individual
household data set. The number of clusters is selected
based on the available categories in the data set.
3) Visualization: Finally, the graphs are created for the
clustered data by plotting the first feature against the sec-
ond feature. The graphs are provided and discussed
in IV. The observations are color-coded based on the
associated clusters.
The visualization results can be used for tariff selection
by customer or tariff recommendation by the supplier, better
demand-side management, and load forecasting.
IV. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
For the purpose of visualization, we reduce the dimension
for each building to two using PCA, K-PCA, Isomap, LLE,
the Laplacian eigenmaps, t-SNE, and autoencoders. With this,
it is possible to see how each reduction technique cluster data
samples with similar consumption patterns. Fig. 4 shows the
cumulative variance explained for each dimension using PCA.
It is observed that more than 90% of the variance is retained
for all three data sets with two dimensions. This suggests that
more than 90% of the information contents are retained in the
case of these data sets if the dimensions are reduced from
the initial respective higher value (13 for residential build-
ings, ten for commercial buildings, and nine for individual
household data set) down to two. In general, many parameters
are recorded for different processes. These recorded para-
meters are correlated with other parameters in many cases.
Xie et al. [40] retained more than 90% variance in two
dimensions. Dimensionality reduction techniques transform
the original data set into higher dimensional space and reduce
the correlation between the features. The amount of variance
retained (more than 90% in our case) is directly linked with
the correlation of parameters.
Fig. 5 shows the first component that is plotted against
the second dimension clustered data for both residential, com-
mercial, and individual household data, and dimensionality
reduction is performed using PCA. It is seen that the low, base,
and high samples are separated but with some overlaps, e.g.,
some samples with high consumption overlap with the base
samples. Similarly, for the commercial data with 16 classes,
some of the classes are clearly separated when projected to a
lower dimension using PCA. There is an overlap between the
observations in both cases. Moreover, a few of the classes are
quite close, and any outlier can easily be labeled incorrectly.
Similarly, summer and winter load profiles are in the opposite
location for individual household consumers, while spring and
autumn data points are in between and overlapped with others.
ALESHINLOYE et al.: EVALUATION OF DIMENSIONALITY REDUCTION TECHNIQUES FOR LOAD PROFILING APPLICATION
Fig. 4. Cumulative variance explained for PCA. (a) Residential.
(b) Commercial. (c) Individual household data set.
With KPCA, we choose a Gaussian-based kernel to map
the samples lying near or on a nonlinear manifold in the
intrinsic dimension to a sample lying on a linear subspace in a
higher dimension. Using a gamma of 1/sample size, we obtain
the lower data projection of KPCA on the residential and
commercial data, as shown in Fig. 6. All four seasons’ load
profiles are overlapped with each other. It is very hard to
visually distinguish them.
Similarly, the first and second reduced features using Isomap
for both residential, commercial, and individual household
data are plotted in Fig. 7. It is required to do a nearest
neighbor parameter search since it impacts the performance
of Isomap. We iteratively search for the best parameter. The
selected nearest-neighbor parameters for both residential and
commercial data are 4 and 5, respectively.
Similar to Isomap, the standard LLE algorithm uses the
nearest neighbor to preserve the local structure. We use the
same technique to select the nearest neighbor. This results
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45
Fig. 5. First feature plot against second feature of the PCA reduced data.
(a) Residential. (b) Commercial. (c) Individual household data set.
in nearest neighbors of 8 and 5, respectively, for both the
residential and commercial data. The plot is shown in Fig. 8.
The LLE-based dimensionality reduction technique is unable
to accurately cluster and identify the load profiles.
The Laplacian eigenmaps preserve the local structure by
weighing the nearest neighbors. The nearest neighbor is cho-
sen as (number of samples/10). The reduced 2-D data are
shown in Fig. 9. The Laplacian eigenmap-based reduced data
visualize the seasonal load profiles in a better way. The data
points for winter and summer are in completely opposite
directions; autumn’s load profile is in the middle and can
also be distinguished. Spring data points are mostly overlapped
with winter.
In t-SNE, the performance is affected by perplexity, learning
rate, and the number of iterations. For the purpose of this
work, we select a perplexity of 30, a learning rate of 200, and
the number of iterations of 1000. Considering the algorithm
outputs different embedding for each run, a total of ten runs
are executed, and the final embedding is the average, as shown
in Fig. 10. t-SNE performs better for individual household
data. All the four clusters can be viewed separately with very
little overlap.
46 IEEE CANADIAN JOURNAL OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING, VOL. 44, NO. 1, WINTER 2021
Fig. 6. First feature plot against second feature of the KPCA reduced data.
(a) Residential. (b) Commercial. (c) Individual household data set.
Autoencoder aims to reduce the data dimensionality by
learning to ignore the signal noise. We train our architecture
using 100 epochs with a batch size of 64 and a learning rate
of 0.01 using Adam optimizer [41]. The reduced dimensions
are activated using ReLu activation to model the nonlinearity
in the output. Fig. 11 shows the first and second component
plots after dimensionality reduction.
The visualization provides a quantitative assessment of
dimension reduction techniques for load profiling applications.
The objective of the proposed method is to create a load
profiling visualization that can accurately cluster different
users. Clusters, being far apart, can also handle the outliers
more effectively. Based on the visualization results, we clearly
see that t-SNE is better suited for the smart meter data and can
accurately separate various classes in all data sets. However,
few of the techniques can only visualize one of the data set
properly, and few of the techniques cannot handle any of the
data set. We can also conclude that nonlinear techniques can
produce better results compared with linear methods. For the
purpose of comparing the reduction techniques, the resulting
clusters are then evaluated using the ARI [42]. Rand index (RI)
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Fig. 7. First feature plot against second feature of the Isomap reduced data.
(a) Residential. (b) Commercial. (c) Individual household data set.
computes a similarity measure between the two clustering
techniques by considering all pairs of samples and counting
pairs that are assigned in the same or different clusters in
the predicted and true clusters and provides a quantitative
measurement. ARI is computed using the following equation:
RI − Expected RI
ARI = . (1)
max(RI) − Expected RI
The resulting scores range from zero (minimum) to one
(maximum). The result for each reduction technique using
two components of the data sets is shown in Table II. From
the result, it is seen that some of the nonlinear dimension-
ality reduction techniques outperform PCA for all data sets
and, thus, confirms that for the application of load profiling,
an indirect clustering technique using nonlinear dimensionality
reduction techniques would perform better. However, the result
of each nonlinear technique is inconsistent with a different
number of runs. This is solved by averaging the results of the
projection over multiple runs.
Furthermore, all nonlinear techniques require tuning para-
meters to obtain the best result. This is a major challenge
ALESHINLOYE et al.: EVALUATION OF DIMENSIONALITY REDUCTION TECHNIQUES FOR LOAD PROFILING APPLICATION
Fig. 8. First feature plot against second feature of the LLE reduced data.
(a) Residential. (b) Commercial. (c) Individual household data set.
TABLE II
C OMPARISON OF D IMENSIONALITY R EDUCTION T ECHNIQUES
FOR L OAD L OSS E VENT D ETECTION U SING ARI S CORE
in selecting the best technique for each task and the
corresponding parameters. Also, the performance of each
technique is dependent on the data as well; from the result,
KPCA performs well in the residential data but fails to capture
the nonlinearity in the commercial data. Similarly, t-SNE has
average performance on the residential data but produces an
impressive score on the commercial data. The t-SNE shows
superiority in terms of visualization for both residential and
commercial data set compared with PCA (linear technique).
The reasons for the superiority of t-SNE technique are:
1) t-SNE is a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique;
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47
Fig. 9. First feature plot against second feature of the Laplacian eigenmaps
reduced data. (a) Residential. (b) Commercial. (c) Individual household
data set.
2) t-SNE is a probabilistic approach; and 3) due to the
nonlinear and probabilistic nature, t-SNE represents the similar
points close together, whereas PCA reduces the dimensionality
by doing the opposite, i.e., placing dissimilar data points far
apart in lower dimension representation. The performance,
in terms of ARI score and visual representation, suggests that
the t-SNE performs better for the load profile visualization in
a smart grid environment.
Table III lists the computational complexity and memory
requirement of the dimensionality reduction techniques. The
computational complexity of the methods is determined by
the number of features m, the window size n, the ratio of
nonzero elements in a sparse matrix to the total number of
elements n z , the number of iterations i , and the weight w. For a
moderate number of features, the computational complexity is
not a major issue for PCA, LLE, and the Laplacian eigenmaps.
A moderate window size would reduce the computational cost
of Isomap, KPCA, t-SNE, and autoencoder. The computational
cost of the encoder–decoder network is dependent on the
number of iterations and the sample size for training. The
48 IEEE CANADIAN JOURNAL OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING, VOL. 44, NO. 1, WINTER 2021
Fig. 10. First feature plot against second feature of the t-SNE reduced data.
(a) Residential. (b) Commercial. (c) Individual household data set.
TABLE III
C OMPUTATIONAL C OMPLEXITY AND M EMORY R EQUIREMENT
OF D IMENSIONALITY R EDUCTION T ECHNIQUES [43]
effect of the weight is negligible because we use only
the first two components of each reduced data. This reduces
the computation time and memory requirement relative to
using the data samples without dimensionality reduction.
V. C ONCLUSION
The traditional power grid usually required voltage, avail-
able power, and simple demand data. With the advent of smart
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Fig. 11. First feature plot against second feature of the autoencoders reduced
data. (a) Residential. (b) Commercial. (c) Individual household data set.
grids, the need for information has also evolved into new
dynamic visualization to incorporate the fuel-based energy
sources along with renewable energy sources. The visual-
izations can empower decision-makers to better understand
the incoming information and, consequently, make a better
decision in response. This work investigated the dimension-
ality reduction for load profile data visualization. We have
employed both linear and nonlinear dimension reduction tech-
niques. The chosen linear dimensionality reduction technique
has no hyperparameters to be tuned aside from choosing the
number of eigenvectors corresponding to high eigenvalues.
It is evident from the experimentation that reducing the
feature vectors to two features retains more than 90% of the
original information contents. In this article, we have provided
two test cases: residential data and commercial data. Our
results show that some of the nonlinear dimensionality reduc-
tion techniques outperform PCA (widely used dimensionality
reduction technique), which emphasizes that the intrinsic
dimension of the energy consumption data for both residential
and commercial use-case is nonlinear. In the residential data,
ALESHINLOYE et al.: EVALUATION OF DIMENSIONALITY REDUCTION TECHNIQUES FOR LOAD PROFILING APPLICATION
we observed KPCA outperforms other techniques, and in the
case of commercial data, we observed t-SNE outperforms
other techniques. This shows that the three data sets have a dif-
ferent distribution, and not just a single dimensionality reduc-
tion technique would work for all data sets. Selecting a suitable
dimensionality reduction technique is very important to retain
the relationship between the data points in a lower dimensional
space and allow for proper load profiling of the consumers.
It can also be concluded from the experimentation that the
nonlinear techniques can outperform the linear techniques.
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