On the effect of sampling frequency on the electricity theft detection performance

Abstract

Electricity theft is a common problem in many countries and affects the revenue of the electricity industry significantly. Recently, machine and deep learning techniques are being used widely to detect thieves by analysing the consumption patterns. While the prediction accuracy of these methods depends on the number and quality of the existing samples used for training models, the majority of previous research work focussed on data with high sampling frequencies, for example, data from smart grids. However, based on technological and operational limitations, the rate of metre reading is too low in many countries, which can affect detection performance. To investigate the effect of sampling frequency on the performance of detection methods, we designed a processing framework to evaluate different classification algorithms on versions of a challenging dataset obtained by down-sampling the original data at various rates. We used different features from time, frequency and time-frequency domains and their combinations in our investigations. Experimental results show that the performance of the models decreases with a small slope up to the sampling frequency of one data per week. The performance degradation rate is significant for data with lower sampling frequencies. We also proposed a bagging network that could improve the overall detection performance at different sampling frequencies.