Journal of Data Science

The complexity of energy infrastructure at large institutions increasingly calls for data-driven monitoring of energy usage. This article presents a hybrid monitoring algorithm for detecting consumption surges using statistical hypothesis testing, leveraging the posterior distribution and its information about uncertainty to introduce randomness in the parameter estimates, while retaining the frequentist testing framework. This hybrid approach is designed to be asymptotically equivalent to the Neyman-Pearson test. We show via extensive simulation studies that the hybrid approach enjoys control over type-1 error rate even with finite sample sizes whereas the naive plug-in method tends to exceed the specified level, resulting in overpowered tests. The proposed method is applied to the natural gas usage data at the University of Connecticut.