Journal of Data Science

Investigation of household electricity usage patterns, and mat- ching the patterns to behaviours, is an important area of research given the centrality of such patterns in addressing the needs of the electricity indu- stry. Additional knowledge of household behaviours will allow more effective targeting of demand side management (DSM) techniques. This paper addresses the question as to whether a reasonable number of meaningful motifs, that each represent a regular activity within a domestic household, can be identified solely using the household level electricity meter data. Using UK data collected from several hundred households in Spring 2011 monitored at a frequency of five minutes, a process for finding repeating short patterns (motifs) is defined. Different ways of representing the motifs exist and a qualitative approach is presented that allows for choosing between the options based on the number of regular behaviours detected (neither too few nor too many).