Apparatus and method for determining days of the week with similar utility consumption profiles

摘要

A method and apparatus for determining days of the week with similar consumption of energy or utility by a computerized system utilizes a pattern recognition algorithm. The algorithm utilizes a time series of energy or utility use data spanning a plurality of days to generate at least one feature of interest for each day. The features of interest may be any or all of average daily utility consumption, maximum utility use during a predefined time interval for the day, minimum utility use over the predefined time interval for the day, and the like. The algorithm transforms the at least one feature of interest for each day to remove the effects of any seasonal variation that may be present in the time series data. The features of interest are then grouped by day of the week to define seven clusters. The algorithm next performs an outlier analysis for each feature of interest in each of the seven clusters to identify and remove any abnormal data. The seven clusters are then analyzed using an modified agglomerative hierarchical clustering method to determine days of the week with similar utility consumption profiles.