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Virginia Tech

Temporal Mining Approaches for Smart Buildings Research

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

With the advent of modern sensor technologies, significant opportunities have opened up to help conserve energy in residential and commercial buildings. Moreover, the rapid urbanization we are witnessing requires optimized energy distribution. This dissertation focuses on two sub-problems in improving energy conservation; energy disaggregation and occupancy prediction. Energy disaggregation attempts to separate the energy usage of each circuit or each electric device in a building using only aggregate electricity usage information from the meter for the whole house. The second problem of occupancy prediction can be accomplished using non-invasive indoor activity tracking to predict the locations of people inside a building. We cast both problems as temporal mining problems. We exploit motif mining with constraints to distinguish devices with multiple states, which helps tackle the energy disaggregation problem. Our results reveal that motif mining is adept at distinguishing devices with multiple power levels and at disentangling the combinatorial operation of devices. For the second problem we propose time-gap constrained episode mining to detect activity patterns followed by the use of a mixture of episode generating HMM (EGH) models to predict home occupancy. Finally, we demonstrate that the mixture EGH model can also help predict the location of a person to address non-invasive indoor activities tracking.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Ph. D.
Level thesis:degree_level
doctoral
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Computer Science and Applications
Department dc:contributor.department
Computer Science
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2017

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Shao, Huijuan
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Ramakrishnan, Naren
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Lu, Chang-Tien
  • Vullikanti, Anil Kumar S.
  • Marwah, Manish
  • Prakash, B. Aditya

Subjects

dc:subject × 4

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:8974
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/84349

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Shao, Huijuan. Temporal Mining Approaches for Smart Buildings Research. doctoral thesis, Virginia Tech, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/84349