Modeling Real-World Flexibility of Residential Power Consumption: Exploring the Cylindrical WeiSSVM Distribution

A user's power consumption flexibility is defined in terms of amount, time and duration of availability. The timing of flexibility is circular in nature. Therefore, it is natural to adopt circular distributions to model this data. This paper investigates the key research question whether that leads to better generative models than using conventional linear distributions. In particular, it fits Gaussian mixture models and a very flexible recent cylindrical (WeiSSVM) distribution mixture to real-world field trial data. Using a predictive accuracy performance measure, it is found that the latter does not provide substantially better fits. Shortcomings of both models are pointed out and it is concluded that research for appropriate statistical models for the observed data is still open.