Identifying AC Control Patterns From a Massive Longitudinal Log Dataset Using Deep Clustering

An air conditioner is a household appliance and one of the most innovative inventions, primarily used to cool indoor temperatures and lower humidity to provide a comfortable environment. The sale of air conditioners increased continuously, reaching approximately 135 million units annually, with nearly 1.6 billion devices currently in operation. While it is important to devise and develop technologies for improving their energy efficiency, it is even more important to analytically investigate the performance of its main objective, user experience, or comfortableness. Here, we collected a massive set of logs collected in a longitudinal manner during the summer season of the year 2021 from approximately 1.47 million AC devices manufactured by LG Electronics and located in South Korea. Among the many features in the log, the current temperature, target temperature, humidity, energy consumption, and wind strength features were used to identify clusters embedding meaningful time-course feature patterns. We particularly focused on identifying patterns and user groups who either actively or inactively controlled the target temperature since such behavior likely indicates a discomforting air state. As a result, a total of 10 distinctive patterns and 14 representative user groups were searched. Among the 10 patterns, five showed active target temperature control and the other five inactive control. Regardless of control activity, all patterns are highly correlated with the progressing weather conditions during the summer. The feature patterns of the actively controlled group significantly differed from those of the inactively controlled group. Further investigation of the semantic difference between the groups would provide valuable research directions for improving the user experience of AC usage. It may also be used to devise an AI-driven automatic AC controller to minimize user intervention while providing an optimal air state.