An energy-fraud detection-system capable of distinguishing frauds from other energy flow anomalies in an urban environment

Abstract

Energy fraud detection bears significantly on urban ecology. Reduced losses and power consumption would affect carbon dioxide emissions and reduce thermal pollution. Fraud detection also provides another layer of urban socio-economic correlation heatmapping and improves city energy distribution. This paper describes a novel algorithm of energy fraud detection, utilizing energy and energy consumption specialized knowledge poured into AI front-end. The proposed algorithm improves fraud detection’s accuracy and reduces the false positive rate, as well as reducing the preliminary required training dataset. The paper also introduces a holistic algorithm, specifying the major phenomena that disguises as energy fraud or affects it. Consequently, a mathematical foundation for energy fraud detection for the proposed algorithm is presented. The results show that a unique pattern is obtained during fraud, which is independent of a reference non-fraud pattern of the same customer. The theory is implemented on real data taken from smart metering systems and validated in real life scenarios.