Finding Anomalous Energy ConsumersUsing Time Series Clustering in the Swedish Energy Market

Abstract: Improving the energy efficiency of buildings is important for many reasons. There is a large body of data detailing the hourly energy consumption of buildings. This work studies a large data set from the Swedish energy market. This thesis proposes a data analysis methodology for identifying abnormal consumption patterns using two steps of clustering. First, typical weekly energy usage profiles are extracted from each building by clustering week-long segments of the building’s lifetime consumption, and by extracting the medoids of the clusters. Second, all the typical weekly energyusage profiles are clustered using agglomerative hierarchical clustering. Large clusters are assumed to contain normal consumption pattens, and small clusters are assumed to have abnormal patterns. Buildings with a large presence in small clusters are said to be abnormal, and vice versa. The method employs Dynamic Time Warping distance for dissimilarity measure. Using a set of 160 buildings, manually classified by domain experts, this thesis shows that the mean abnormality-score is higher for abnormal buildings compared to normal buildings with p ≈ 0.0036.