Extremely randomised trees machine learning model for electricity theft detection

Pattern-based and context-aware electricity theft detection in smart grid

Electricity theft is harmful to power grids. Integrating information flows with energy flows, smart grids can help to solve the problem of electricity theft owning to the availability of massive data generated from smart grids. The data analysis on the data of smart grids is helpful in detecting electricity theft because of the abnormal electricity consumption pattern of energy thieves. However, the existing methods have poor detection accuracy of electricity theft since most of them were conducted on one-dimensional (1-D) electricity consumption data and failed to capture the periodicity of electricity consumption. In this paper, we originally propose a novel electricity-theft detection method based on wide and deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) model to address the above concerns. In particular, wide and deep CNN model consists of two components: the wide component and the deep CNN component. The deep CNN component can accurately identify the nonperiodicity of electricity theft and the periodicity of normal electricity usage based on 2-D electricity consumption data. Meanwhile, the wide component can capture the global features of 1-D electricity consumption data. As a result, wide and deep CNN model can achieve the excellent performance in electricity-theft detection. Extensive experiments based on realistic dataset show that wide and deep CNN model outperforms other existing methods.

Obtaining outstanding electricity theft detection (ETD) performance in the realm of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and smart grids (SGs) is quite difficult due to various issues. The issues include limited availability of theft data as compared to benign data, neglecting dimensionality reduction, usage of the standalone (single) electricity theft detectors, etc. These issues lead the classification techniques to low accuracy, minimum precision, low F1 score, and overfitting problems. For these reasons, it is extremely crucial to design such a novel strategy that is capable to tackle these issues and yield outstanding ETD performance. In this article, electricity theft happening in SGs is detected using a novel ETD approach. The proposed approach comprises recursive feature elimination (RFE), k nearest neighbor oversampling (KNNOR), bidirectional long short term memory (BiLSTM), and logit boosting (LogitBoost) techniques. Furthermore, three BiLSTM networks and a LogitBoost model are combined to make a BiLSTM-LogitBoost stacking ensemble model. Data preprocessing and feature selection followed by data balancing and electricity theft classification are the four major stages of the model proposed for ETD. It is obvious from the simulations performed using state grid corporation of China (SGCC)’s electricity consumption (EC) data that our proposed model achieves 96.32% precision, 94.33% F1 score, and 89.45% accuracy, which are higher than all the benchmarks employed in this study.

In smart grids, electricity theft is the most significant challenge. It cannot be identified easily since existing methods are dependent on specific devices. Also, the methods lack in extracting meaningful information from high-dimensional electricity consumption data and increase the false positive rate that limit their performance. Moreover, imbalanced data is a hurdle in accurate electricity theft detection (ETD) using data driven methods. To address this problem, sampling techniques are used in the literature. However, the traditional sampling techniques generate insufficient and unrealistic data that degrade the ETD rate. In this work, two novel ETD models are developed. A hybrid sampling approach, i.e., synthetic minority oversampling technique with edited nearest neighbor, is introduced in the first model. Furthermore, AlexNet is used for dimensionality reduction and extracting useful information from electricity consumption data. Finally, a light gradient boosting model is used for classification purpose. In the second model, conditional wasserstein generative adversarial network with gradient penalty is used to capture the real distribution of the electricity consumption data. It is constructed by adding auxiliary provisional information to generate more realistic data for the minority class. Moreover, GoogLeNet architecture is employed to reduce the dataset's dimensionality. Finally, adaptive boosting is used for classification of honest and suspicious consumers. Both models are trained and tested using real power consumption data provided by state grid corporation of China. The proposed models' performance is evaluated using different performance metrics like precision, recall, accuracy, F1-score, etc. The simulation results prove that the proposed models outperform the existing techniques, such as support vector machine, extreme gradient boosting, convolution neural network, etc., in terms of efficient ETD.

Electricity-Theft Detection in Smart Grid Based on Deep Learning

Electricity is widely used around 80% of the world. Electricity theft has dangerous effects on utilities in terms of power efficiency and costs billions of dollars per annum. The enhancement of the traditional grids gave rise to smart grids that enable one to resolve the dilemma of electricity theft detection (ETD) using an extensive amount of data formulated by smart meters. This data are used by power utilities to examine the consumption behaviors of consumers and to decide whether the consumer is an electricity thief or benign. However, the traditional data-driven methods for ETD have poor detection performances due to the high-dimensional imbalanced data and their limited ETD capability. In this paper, we present a new class balancing mechanism based on the interquartile minority oversampling technique and a combined ETD model to overcome the shortcomings of conventional approaches. The combined ETD model is composed of long short-term memory (LSTM), UNet and adaptive boosting (Adaboost), and termed LSTM–UNet–Adaboost. In this regard, LSTM–UNet–Adaboost combines the advantages of deep learning (LSTM-UNet) along with ensemble learning (Adaboost) for ETD. Moreover, the performance of the proposed LSTM–UNet–Adaboost scheme was simulated and evaluated over the real-time smart meter dataset given by the State Grid Corporation of China. The simulations were conducted using the most appropriate performance indicators, such as area under the curve, precision, recall and F1 measure. The proposed solution obtained the highest results as compared to the existing benchmark schemes in terms of selected performance measures. More specifically, it achieved the detection rate of 0.92, which was the highest among existing benchmark schemes, such as logistic regression, support vector machine and random under-sampling boosting technique. Therefore, the simulation outcomes validate that the proposed LSTM–UNet–Adaboost model surpasses other traditional methods in terms of ETD and is more acceptable for real-time practices.

Electricity theft is one of the challenging problems in smart grids. The power utilities around the globe face huge economic loss due to ET. The traditional electricity theft detection (ETD) models confront several challenges, such as highly imbalance distribution of electricity consumption data, curse of dimensionality and inevitable effects of non-malicious factors. To cope with the aforementioned concerns, this paper presents a novel ETD strategy for smart grids based on theft attacks, long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) called TLGRU. It includes three subunits: (1) synthetic theft attacks based data balancing, (2) LSTM based feature extraction, and (3) GRU based theft classification. GRU is used for drift identification. It stores and extracts the long-term dependency in the power consumption data. It is beneficial for drift identification. In this way, a minimum false positive rate (FPR) is obtained. Moreover, dropout regularization and Adam optimizer are added in GRU for tackling overfitting and trapping model in the local minima, respectively. The proposed TLGRU model uses the realistic EC profiles of the Chinese power utility state grid corporation of China for analysis and to solve the ETD problem. From the simulation results, it is exhibited that 1% FPR, 97.96% precision, 91.56% accuracy, and 91.68% area under curve for ETD are obtained by the proposed model. The proposed model outperforms the existing models in terms of ETD.

In the modern world, there are numerous opportunities that help in the detection of electricity theft happening in the realm of electricity grids due to the widespread shifting of people from old metering infrastructure to advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). It is done by studying the consumers’ energy consumption (EC) readings provided by the smart meters (SM). The literature introduces a variety of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) strategies to use EC data for identifying power theft in smart grids (SGs). However, the existing schemes provide low performance in terms of electricity theft detection (ETD) due to the usage of imbalanced data and using schemes in an individual manner. Moreover, the existing detectors are validated using a limited number of performance evaluation measures, which are not suitable for conducting model’s comprehensive validation. To tackle the above mentioned problems, an ML boosting classifiers based stacking ensemble model (MLBCSM) is proposed followed by adaptive synthetic sampling technique (ADASYN) in the underlying work. Data preprocessing followed by data balancing and classification are the three major parts of the model introduced in this work. Besides, the EC data acquired from the consumers’ SMs is used for detecting electricity theft. Moreover, the simulation results reveal that MLBCSM combines the benefits of adaptive boosting (AdaBoost), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), histogram boosting (HistBoost), categorical boosting (CatBoost), and light gradient boosting (LGBoost). Additionally, the model’s validation is ensured via different metrics. It is deduced via extensive simulations that the proposed model’s outcomes are superior to those produced by the individual models in terms of ETD.

A data mining-based framework for the identification of daily electricity usage patterns and anomaly detection in building electricity consumption data

Hybrid non-technical-loss detection in fog-enabled smart grids

Data classification of users’ electricity consumption provides an in-depth analysis for users’ electricity consumption status, which plays a vital role in the management and distribution of electric energy. So, some data classification methods have been proposed to solve the classification problem of electricity consumption data. However, plaintext-based data classification may bring about the privacy leakage of electricity consumption data. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving classification scheme for electricity consumption data under fog computing-based smart metering system, which is based on convolutional neural network (CNN) model with fully homomorphic method (CKKS). The target of our proposed scheme is to solve the leakage problem of private electricity consumption data during the classification procedure. In our scheme, an improved K-means-based labeling algorithm is constructed to process historical electricity consumption data, which is used as the sample data to train the CNN classification model by cloud server. Also, the fog nodes are only permitted to obtain the related ciphertext parameters of the trained CNN model, and perform the classification of ciphertext-based electricity consumption data generated by fully homomorphic method. Based on the classical testing data, the experimental results show that our proposed classification scheme can provide the high classification accuracy of electricity data while protecting the privacy of electricity data.

In underdeveloped nations, where power grids provide insufficient and unstable power, electricity theft is most prevalent. Approximately $96 billion is lost annually due to electricity theft worldwide. Theft of electrical power is considered an offence known as electricity theft. Energy theft is a common behavior that predates the distribution of electricity. A range of techniques, from the most basic, such as simply connecting to a power line, through the manipulation of computerized electrical meters, are used to steal electricity. Fines and jail are a few of the penalties for the offence. Non- technical losses are those resulting from the theft's impact on the electricity supply. Many methods for identifying electricity theft have been put forth. This paper presents a prototype model which helps the distribution companies (DISCO) that transfers energy from generating stations to consumers to digitalize the present tariff system. It is accomplished by sending the messages to the consumer of their energy consumption and reduce the non-technical losses which occurs mainly due to energy theft by direct hooking from service lines and bypassing the metering system. With the use of a smart energy meter, this model is utilized to automatically determine when and where a theft is occurring by any resident, business, industry, etc. This paper also presents a method to find location of the electricity theft as quickly as possible, thereby allowing the distributors to take necessary measures to rectify the situation and penalize the wrongdoers.

Electricity theft (ET), which endangers public safety, creates a problem with the regular operation of grid infrastructure and increases revenue losses. Numerous machine learning, deep learning, and mathematical-based algorithms are available to find ET. Still, these models do not produce the best results due to problems like the dimensionality curse, class imbalance, improper hyper-parameter tuning of machine learning and deep learning models, etc. We present a hybrid deep learning model for effectively detecting electricity thieves in smart grids while considering the abovementioned concerns. Pre-processing techniques are first employed to clean up the data from the smart meters. Then, the feature extraction technique, like AlexNet, addresses the curse of dimensionality. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated through simulations using a real dataset of Chinese intelligent meters. To conduct a comparative analysis, various benchmark models are implemented as well. Our proposed model achieves accuracy, precision, recall, and F1, up to 86%, 89%, 86%, and 84%, respectively.

In recent years, the problem of electrical load forecasting gained attention due to the arrival of new measurement technologies that produce electrical energy consumption data at very short intervals of time. Such short term measurements become voluminous in very short time. The availability of big electrical consumption data allows machine learning techniques to be employed to analyze consumption behavior of every consumer on a greater detail. Predicting the consumption of a residential customer is crucial at this point of time because tailor-made consumer-specific tariffs will play a vital role in load balancing process of Utilities. This paper analyzes the electrical consumption of a single residential customer measured using a smart meter that is capable of measuring electrical consumption at circuit level. The issues and challenges in collecting the data and pre-processing required for making them suitable for data analytics are discussed in detail. A comparison of the performance of different machine learning algorithms implemented using Python’s Scikit-learn module gives an insight on the consumption pattern.

With the development of IoT technology, smart grid has gradually replaced the traditional grid. Smart grid is convenient and fast. It can provide real-time residential electricity monitoring and forecasting, give users better electricity guidance and save a lot of labor costs. Smart meters send customers’ electricity consumption data to the gateway, which aggregates the data and then sends it to the electricity consumption control center. But in this process, there will be a security problem of leakage of customer’s electricity consumption data. Most of the current user data privacy protection collection schemes use homomorphic encryption and randomization techniques. However, some of these schemes require a trusted third-party entity, and some may cause significant computational overhead. Due to the limited computational resources of smart meters, these techniques may be impractical. In this paper, we propose a local differential privacy data aggregation protection scheme based on the idea of grouping perturbation of electricity consumption data according to data domains. Experiments show that our scheme can provide statistical estimates of electricity in the region while satisfying the privacy protection of customers’ electricity consumption data. Moreover, our scheme has small computational and communication overheads, which can meet the application requirements in practical scenarios.