Understanding the energy consumption patterns of different types of consumers is essential in any planning of energy distribution. However, obtaining consumption information for single individuals is often either not possible or too expensive. Therefore, we consider data from aggregations of energy use, that is, from sums of individuals’ energy use, where each individual falls into one of C consumer classes. Although energy companies do have the reported number of individuals in each consumer class, reporting is not always reliable—the exact number of individuals of each class may be unknown. We develop a methodology to estimate the true number of consumers in each class and the expected energy use of each class as a function of time. We apply our method to a data set and study our method via simulation.
This is joint work with Amanda Lenzia, Camila P.E. de Souza, Ronaldo Dias, and Nancy L. Garcia.