Boruta-XGBoost Electricity Theft Detection Based on Features of Electric Energy Parameters

Abstract

Electricity theft detection is critical for the safe and effective development of the electric power system. The existing methods that are used to detect electricity theft rely on historical load data and are considered to have poor timeliness. Their detection results have limited reference to power supply enterprises’ investigation on electricity theft. Therefore, this paper proposes the Boruta-XGBoost power theft detection model based on multiple features of electric energy parameters. The model converts electricity theft detection problem into a multiclass classification problem. First, the features of various electric energy parameters that are collected by the electric energy metering device are used to construct the original dataset. Then, the Boruta algorithm is used to select features and reconstruct the dataset based on the selection results. Finally, the reconstructed dataset is used to train an XGBoost model that can detect the type of electricity theft based on the features of real-time electric energy parameters. In order to verify the effectiveness of the model, a comparative experiment is conducted in this paper. The reconstructed dataset is used to train the following algorithms: LightGBM, CART, SVM, and logistic regression models. The test results show that the Boruta-XGBoost model in this paper has the best effect on electricity theft detection.