The invention discloses a smart socket-based electrical appliance type inference method and device, wherein the method comprises the following steps: constructing a user power data set according to electrical appliance power consumption data, and constructing an electrical appliance power consumption characteristic model library according to the electrical appliance power consumption characteristic; constructing an electrical appliance behavior data set according to the user power data set and the electrical appliance power consumption characteristic model library; constructing a characteristic vector extracting model according to the electrical appliance behavior data set so as to construct a power consumption characteristic vector data set; constructing an electrical appliance type classifier according to the power consumption characteristic vector data set and a machine learning algorithm; detecting the power consumption data of a to-be-measured electrical appliance and determiningthe electrical type of the to-be-measured electrical appliance through the model and the classifier. According to the method, the power data of the user is collected through a smart socket; by extracting the characteristics of the range of the power consumption of the household appliances, the duty ratio of the power consumption and the duration of time of power consumption, the power utilizationbehavior of the user is inferred, an electrical appliance behavior event data set is generated, and an electrical appliance type classifier is constructed based on the machine learning model, so thatthe type of the utilized electrical appliance can be inferred in real time; the robustness is high; and the method is simple and easy to implement.