研究电表数据时间粒度如何影响家庭人口特征推断,发现粗粒度数据仍可保留关键信息。
The Impact of Temporal Granularity on Socio-Demographic Inference from Household Load Profiles

- 测试15分钟到7天不同时间粒度对8类人口属性的预测效果
- 15分钟至1小时、1天至7天内预测性能稳定,可减少数据采集量
- 粗粒度数据仍能推断房屋大小,但泳池使用需细粒度信号
智能电表数据可揭示家庭敏感的社会人口特征,引发隐私担忧。尽管固定时间粒度下的风险已有研究,但时间分辨率对推断性能的影响仍不明确。本文分析了1,589户家庭一年内从15分钟到7天不同时间粒度的用电负荷曲线,对8个社会人口属性进行预测。采用评估框架:模型在全年数据上训练,但在任意周上测试,强制其跨季节和周周期泛化。结果表明:第一,虽粗粒度降低预测准确率,但存在两个性能平台期——15分钟至1小时间、1天至7天间表现稳定,说明可在不影响效用前提下实现数据最小化;第二,可解释的手工特征与tsfresh特征与基于CNN的自编码器嵌入表现相当,而XGBoost始终优于其他分类器;第三,特征重要性分析显示静态属性(如房屋面积)即使在粗粒度下也可推断,而动态属性(如泳池使用)依赖精细时间信号。研究揭示了智能计量中隐私-效用权衡的新机制。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Smart meter data can reveal sensitive socio-demographic characteristics of households, raising privacy concerns. While this risk has been demonstrated at fixed granularities, the role of temporal resolution in shaping inference performance remains insufficiently explored. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing how load profiles with granularities from 15 minutes to 7 days affect the predictability of eight socio-demographic attributes in a dataset of 1,589 households over one year. We introduce an evaluation framework where classifiers are trained on year-round data but tested on arbitrary weeks, forcing generalization across seasonal and weekly variations. Our results show three main findings. First, while coarsening granularity reduces predictive accuracy, two plateaus emerge: performance is stable between 15 minutes and 1 hour, and again between 1 and 7 days. This reveals opportunities for data minimization without sacrificing utility. Second, interpretable handcrafted and tsfresh features remain competitive with CNN-based autoencoder embeddings, while XGBoost consistently outperforms alternative classifiers. Third, feature importance analysis highlights differences between static and dynamic attributes: dwelling size can be inferred even from coarse data, whereas swimming pool usage requires fine-grained temporal signals. Overall, our study provides new insights into the privacy-utility trade-off in smart metering, showing how temporal resolution, feature extraction, and classifier choice jointly influence socio-demographic inference.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。