EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Electricity Theft Detection Using Supervised Learning Techniques on Smart Meter Data

Zahoor Ali Khan, Muhammad Adil, Nadeem Javaid, Malik Najmus Saqib, Muhammad Shafiq and Jin-Ghoo Choi
Additional contact information
Zahoor Ali Khan: Computer Information Science, Higher Colleges of Technology, Fujairah 4114, UAE
Muhammad Adil: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad 44000, Pakistan
Nadeem Javaid: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad 44000, Pakistan
Malik Najmus Saqib: Department of Cybersecurity, College of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Jeddah, Jeddah 21959, Saudi Arabia
Muhammad Shafiq: Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan, Gyeongbuk 38541, Korea
Jin-Ghoo Choi: Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan, Gyeongbuk 38541, Korea

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 19, 1-25

Abstract: Due to the increase in the number of electricity thieves, the electric utilities are facing problems in providing electricity to their consumers in an efficient way. An accurate Electricity Theft Detection (ETD) is quite challenging due to the inaccurate classification on the imbalance electricity consumption data, the overfitting issues and the High False Positive Rate (FPR) of the existing techniques. Therefore, intensified research is needed to accurately detect the electricity thieves and to recover a huge revenue loss for utility companies. To address the above limitations, this paper presents a new model, which is based on the supervised machine learning techniques and real electricity consumption data. Initially, the electricity data are pre-processed using interpolation, three sigma rule and normalization methods. Since the distribution of labels in the electricity consumption data is imbalanced, an Adasyn algorithm is utilized to address this class imbalance problem. It is used to achieve two objectives. Firstly, it intelligently increases the minority class samples in the data. Secondly, it prevents the model from being biased towards the majority class samples. Afterwards, the balanced data are fed into a Visual Geometry Group (VGG-16) module to detect abnormal patterns in electricity consumption. Finally, a Firefly Algorithm based Extreme Gradient Boosting (FA-XGBoost) technique is exploited for classification. The simulations are conducted to show the performance of our proposed model. Moreover, the state-of-the-art methods are also implemented for comparative analysis, i.e., Support Vector Machine (SVM), Convolution Neural Network (CNN), and Logistic Regression (LR). For validation, precision, recall, F1-score, Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC), Receiving Operating Characteristics Area Under Curve (ROC-AUC), and Precision Recall Area Under Curve (PR-AUC) metrics are used. Firstly, the simulation results show that the proposed Adasyn method has improved the performance of FA-XGboost classifier, which has achieved F1-score, precision, and recall of 93.7%, 92.6%, and 97%, respectively. Secondly, the VGG-16 module achieved a higher generalized performance by securing accuracy of 87.2% and 83.5% on training and testing data, respectively. Thirdly, the proposed FA-XGBoost has correctly identified actual electricity thieves, i.e., recall of 97%. Moreover, our model is superior to the other state-of-the-art models in terms of handling the large time series data and accurate classification. These models can be efficiently applied by the utility companies using the real electricity consumption data to identify the electricity thieves and overcome the major revenue losses in power sector.

Keywords: data pre-processing; electricity theft; imbalance data; parameter tuning; smart grid (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/19/8023/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/19/8023/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:19:p:8023-:d:421042

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:19:p:8023-:d:421042