Ensemble bagged tree based classification for reducing non-technical losses in multan electric power company of Pakistan

Abstract

Non-technical losses (NTLs) have been a major concern for power distribution companies (PDCs). Billions of dollars are lost each year due to fraud in billing, metering, and illegal consumer activities. Various studies have explored different methodologies for efficiently identifying fraudster consumers. This study proposes a new approach for NTL detection in PDCs by using the ensemble bagged tree (EBT) algorithm. The bagged tree is an ensemble of many decision trees which considerably improves the classification performance of many individual decision trees by combining their predictions to reach a final decision. This approach relies on consumer energy usage data to identify any abnormality in consumption which could be associated with NTL behavior. The key motive of the current study is to provide assistance to the Multan Electric Power Company (MEPCO) in Punjab, Pakistan for its campaign against energy stealers. The model developed in this study generates the list of suspicious consumers with irregularities in consumption data to be further examined on-site. The accuracy of the EBT algorithm for NTL detection is found to be 93.1%, which is considerably higher compared to conventional techniques such as support vector machine (SVM), k-th nearest neighbor (KNN), decision trees (DT), and random forest (RF) algorithm.