DeviceScope: An Interactive App to Detect and Localize Appliance Patterns in Electricity Consumption Time Series
This work addresses the challenge of detecting and localizing appliance-level on/off events from aggregated smart meter data—without access to device-level ground-truth labels—specifically targeting non-expert end users. Method: We propose CamAL, a weakly supervised localization framework that leverages Class Activation Mapping (CAM) integrated with temporal convolutional networks, requiring only household-level appliance presence labels for training. We further introduce an interactive visualization system (built with React and D3) enabling user-driven pattern verification and active learning feedback. Contribution/Results: Evaluated on real-world smart meter datasets, CamAL achieves an 89.2% F1-score and a mean localization error of ±12.3 seconds, substantially reducing annotation effort. The system has been deployed in pilot programs across three European utility providers, advancing the practical adoption of fine-grained electricity consumption behavior analysis.