The smart grid is an important application field of the Internet of things. This paper presents a method of user electricity consumption pattern analysis for smart grid applications based on the audio feature EEUPC. A novel similarity function based on EEUPC is adapted to support clustering analysis of residential load patterns. The EEUPC similarity exploits features of peaks and valleys on curves instead of directly comparing values and obtains better performance for clustering analysis. Moreover, the proposed approach performs load pattern clustering, extracts a typical pattern for each cluster, and gives suggestions toward better power consumption for each typical pattern. Experimental results demonstrate that the EEUPC similarity is more consistent with human judgment than the Euclidean distance and higher clustering performance can be achieved for residential electric load data.
