Energy saving in smart homes based on consumer behaviour: A case study

This paper presents a case study of a recommender system that can be used to save energy in smart homes without lowering the comfort of the inhabitants. We present an algorithm that uses consumer behavior data only and uses machine learning to suggest actions for inhabitants to reduce the energy consumption of their homes. The system mines for frequent and periodic patterns in the event data provided by the Digitalstrom home automation system. These patterns are converted into association rules, prioritized and compared with the current behavior of the inhabitants. If the system detects an opportunities to save energy without decreasing the comfort level it sends a recommendation to the residents.Comment: To be presented on IEEE International Smart Cities Conference 201

Generating Time-Based Label Refinements to Discover More Precise Process Models

Process mining is a research field focused on the analysis of event data with the aim of extracting insights related to dynamic behavior. Applying process mining techniques on data from smart home environments has the potential to provide valuable insights in (un)healthy habits and to contribute to ambient assisted living solutions. Finding the right event labels to enable the application of process mining techniques is however far from trivial, as simply using the triggering sensor as the label for sensor events results in uninformative models that allow for too much behavior (overgeneralizing). Refinements of sensor level event labels suggested by domain experts have been shown to enable discovery of more precise and insightful process models. However, there exists no automated approach to generate refinements of event labels in the context of process mining. In this paper we propose a framework for the automated generation of label refinements based on the time attribute of events, allowing us to distinguish behaviourally different instances of the same event type based on their time attribute. We show on a case study with real life smart home event data that using automatically generated refined labels in process discovery, we can find more specific, and therefore more insightful, process models. We observe that one label refinement could have an effect on the usefulness of other label refinements when used together. Therefore, we explore four strategies to generate useful combinations of multiple label refinements and evaluate those on three real life smart home event logs

Leveraging Machine Learning and Big Data for Smart Buildings: A Comprehensive Survey

Future buildings will offer new convenience, comfort, and efficiency possibilities to their residents. Changes will occur to the way people live as technology involves into people's lives and information processing is fully integrated into their daily living activities and objects. The future expectation of smart buildings includes making the residents' experience as easy and comfortable as possible. The massive streaming data generated and captured by smart building appliances and devices contains valuable information that needs to be mined to facilitate timely actions and better decision making. Machine learning and big data analytics will undoubtedly play a critical role to enable the delivery of such smart services. In this paper, we survey the area of smart building with a special focus on the role of techniques from machine learning and big data analytics. This survey also reviews the current trends and challenges faced in the development of smart building services

Using Association Rule Mining to Discover Temporal Relations of Daily Activities

Abstract. The increasing aging population has inspired many machine learning researchers to find innovative solutions for assisted living. A problem often encountered in assisted living settings is activity recognition. Although activity recognition has been vastly studied by many researchers, the temporal features that constitute an activity usually have been ignored by researchers. Temporal features can provide useful insights for building predictive activity models and for recognizing activities. In this paper, we explore the use of temporal features for activity recognition in assisted living settings. We discover temporal relations such as order of activities, as well as their corresponding start time and duration features. To validate our method, we used four months of real data collected from a smart home