Evolutionary Deep Nets for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

Compact appliance classifiers can support local electricity-load monitoring where memory and computation are constrained. We evaluate adaptive sparse evolutionary training and warm-start compression using synthetic aggregate windows derived from household appliance recordings. A completed convolutional network study trains 120 models over four targets and three seeds with validation-only model selection. Two analyses examine compression with approximately preserved binary accuracy and joint improvement in positive-class F1 and sparsity. Relative to a newly trained fixed sparse evolutionary baseline, the selected compressed policy changes accuracy from 91.53%, while increasing macro F1 to 92.40%. Stored weights decrease by 17.36% and active first-layer connections by 23.93%. Refinement requires additional training. Three seeds and unverified source-window independence prevent claims of statistical equivalence or unseen-house performance.