The increasing household loads make series arc faults more complex, which are difficult to be detected by traditional circuit breakers and lead to the frequent occurrence of residential fire accidents. In this paper, a comprehensive approach of complex load recognition and series arc detection is proposed on the basis of principal component analysis and support vector machine (PCA-SVM) combination model. Several typical loads were selected and analyzed, especially nonlinear and complex loads

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... e power electronics load and multi-state load. Three time-domain parameters, maximum slip difference (MSD), zero current period (ZCP) and maximum Euclidean distance (MED), and nine frequency-domain harmonics information are collected to complex waveforms. To decrease the computation cost and further to enhance the response velocity, all the time-domain and frequency-domain information were blended and dimensionally reduced to three parameters by principal component analysis (PCA). Prior to the series arc detection, load recognition is trained and completed with the artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm. At last, the comprehensive model of load recognition and series arc detection is achieved based on a support vector machine (SVM). The accuracy of load recognition and series arc detection reaches 99.1% and 99.3%, respectively, demonstrating the excellent performances of the intelligent approach to diagnose the series arcing activities in modern household applications. INDEX TERMS Series arc faults, dimensionality reduction, support vector machine, load recognition, arc detection.