A Two-Stage Model to Detect Electricity Fraud in The Distribution Network Using Deep Learning

Electricity utility have long sought to identify and reduce energy theft, which represents significant part of non-technical losses. On the other hand, once a fraudulent customer is detected, on-site inspection is necessary for final verification. Since inspecting all customers is expensive, utilities seek to reduce the range of inspection to cases with a higher probability of theft. One way to reduce the scope of inspection is to use artificial intelligence-based methods. An essential challenge here is data imbalance in terms of the ratio of normal to fraudulent customers, which leads to the poor performance of algorithms. In This paper in order to overcome this challenge, assuming that suspicious behavior can be expressed as a mathematical function of normal behavior, in the first stage, the consumption pattern of normal and suspicious customers is categorized using clustering algorithms. Then a deep neural network is trained to model suspicious customers. Next, using trained network, possible theft scenarios for normal costumers are predicted. Finally, a secondary deep neural network is trained to separate the normal and suspicious customers. Assessment of the proposed algorithm for different scenarios on a real data-set with more than 6000 customers and comparison with previous research shows its high performance.