A Fundamental Bound on Performance of Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring with Application to Smart Meter Privacy

Abstract

We prove that the expected estimation error of non-intrusive load monitoring algorithms is lower bounded by the trace of the inverse of the cross-correlation matrix between the derivatives of the load profiles of the appliances. We use this fundamental bound to develop privacy-preserving policies. Particularly, we devise a load-scheduling policy by maximizing the lower bound on the expected estimation error of non-intrusive load monitoring algorithms.