Holistic Measures for Evaluating Prediction Models in Smart Grids

The performance of prediction models is often based on "abstract metrics" that estimate the model's ability to limit residual errors between the observed and predicted values. However, meaningful evaluation and selection of prediction models for end-user domains requires holistic and application-sensitive performance measures. Inspired by energy consumption prediction models used in the emerging "big data" domain of Smart Power Grids, we propose a suite of performance measures to rationally compare models along the dimensions of scale independence, reliability, volatility and cost. We include both application independent and dependent measures, the latter parameterized to allow customization by domain experts to fit their scenario. While our measures are generalizable to other domains, we offer an empirical analysis using real energy use data for three Smart Grid applications: planning, customer education and demand response, which are relevant for energy sustainability. Our results underscore the value of the proposed measures to offer a deeper insight into models' behavior and their impact on real applications, which benefit both data mining researchers and practitioners.Comment: 14 Pages, 8 figures, Accepted and to appear in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2014. Authors' final version. Copyright transferred to IEE

Phases, Modalities, Temporal and Spatial Locality: Domain Specific ML Prefetcher for Accelerating Graph Analytics

Memory performance is a bottleneck in graph analytics acceleration. Existing Machine Learning (ML) prefetchers struggle with phase transitions and irregular memory accesses in graph processing. We propose MPGraph, an ML-based Prefetcher for Graph analytics using domain specific models. MPGraph introduces three novel optimizations: soft detection for phase transitions, phase-specific multi-modality models for access delta and page predictions, and chain spatio-temporal prefetching (CSTP) for prefetch control. Our transition detector achieves 34.17-82.15% higher precision compared with Kolmogorov-Smirnov Windowing and decision tree. Our predictors achieve 6.80-16.02% higher F1-score for delta and 11.68-15.41% higher accuracy-at-10 for page prediction compared with LSTM and vanilla attention models. Using CSTP, MPGraph achieves 12.52-21.23% IPC improvement, outperforming state-of-the-art non-ML prefetcher BO by 7.58-12.03% and ML-based prefetchers Voyager and TransFetch by 3.27-4.58%. For practical implementation, we demonstrate MPGraph using compressed models with reduced latency shows significantly superior accuracy and coverage compared with BO, leading to 3.58% higher IPC improvement

SEMANTIC SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS FOR THE ENTERPRISE

Business processes are generally fixed and enforced strictly, as reflected by the static nature of underlying software systems and datasets. However, internal and external situations, organizational changes and various other factors trigger dynamism, which is reflected in the form of issues, complains, Q&A, opinions, reviews, etc, over a plethora of communication channels, such as email, chat, discussion forums, and internal social network. Careful and timely analysis and processing of such channels may lead to early detection of emerging trends, critical issues, opportunities, topics of interests, contributors, experts etc. Social network analytics have been successfully applied in general purpose, online social network platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. However, in order for such techniques to be useful in business context, it is mandatory to integrate them with underlying business systems, processes and practices. Such integration problem is increasingly recognized as Big Data problem. We argue that SemanticWeb technology applied with social network analytics can solve enterprise knowledge management, while achieving integration

Optimal Customer Targeting for Sustainable Demand Response in Smart Grids1

AbstractDemand Response (DR) is a widely used technique to minimize the peak to average consumption ratio during high demand periods. We consider the DR problem of achieving a given curtailment target for a set of consumers equipped with a set of discrete curtailment strategies over a given duration. An effective DR scheduling algorithm should minimize the curtailment error - the difference between the targeted and achieved curtailment values - to minimize costs to the utility provider and maintain system reliability. The availability of smart meters with fine-grained customer control capability can be leveraged to offer customers a dynamic range of curtailment strategies that are feasible for small durations within the overall DR event. Both the availability and achievable curtailment values of these strategies can vary dynamically through the DR event and thus the problem of achieving a target curtailment over the entire DR interval can be modeled as a dynamic strategy selection problem over multiple discrete sub-intervals. We argue that DR curtailment error minimizing algorithms should not be oblivious to customer curtailment behavior during sub-intervals as (expensive) demand peaks can be concentrated in a few sub-intervals while consumption is heavily curtailed during others in order to achieve the given target, which makes such solutions expensive for the utility. Thus in this paper, we formally develop the notion of Sustainable DR (SDR) as a solution that attempts to distribute the curtailment evenly across sub-intervals in the DR event. We formulate the SDR problem as an Integer Linear Program and provide a very fast -factor approximation algorithm. We then propose a Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) for approximating the SDR curtailment error to within an arbitrarily small factor of the optimal. We then develop a novel ILP formulation that solves the SDR problem while explicitly accounting for customer strategy switching overhead as a constraint. We perform experiments using real data acquired from the University of Southern Californias smart grid and show that our sustainable DR model achieves results with a very low absolute error of 0.001-0.05 kWh range