Electricity plan recommender system with electrical instruction-based recovery

Several electricity tariffs have emerged for Demand Side Management (DSM) and residential customers are faced with challenges to choose the plan satisfying their personal needs. Electricity Plan Recommender System (EPRS) can alleviate the problem. This paper proposes a novel EPRS model named EPRS with Electrical Instruction-based Recovery (EPRS-EI), which is a dual-stage model consisting of feature formulation stage and recommender stage. In the feature formulation stage, matrix recovery with electrical instructions is applied to recover appliance usages, and the recovered data is set as features representing customers’ living patterns. In the recommender stage, Collaborative Filtering Recommender System (CFRS) based on K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and adjusted similarity is applied to recommend personal electricity plans to customers based on the above features. Different from other EPRS models, EPRS-EI is the first model utilizing matrix recovery methods and similarity computation with electrical instructions. With these electrical instructions, the proposed model is able to utilize more explicit features and recommend more personalized plans. We then apply EPRS-EI to predict the testing customers’ preference for electricity plans. Simulation results on recovering electricity data and their applications in EPRS confirm the effectiveness of the proposed methods in comparison to state-of-the-art methods, with 93.56%–94.85% customers correctly recommended. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd