Support Vector Machine Approach for Non-Technical Losses Identification in Power Distribution Systems

Electricity consumer fraud is a problem faced by all power utilities. Finding efficient measurements for detecting fraudulent electricity consumption has been an active research area in recent years. In this paper,the approach towards nontechnical loss (NTL) detection in power utilities using an artificial intelligence based technique, Support Vector Machine (SVM), are presented. This approach provides a method of data mining, which involves feature extraction from past consumption data. This SVM based approach uses customer load profile information and additional attributes to expose abnormal behavior that is known to be highly correlated with NTL activities. Some key advantages of SVM in data clustering, among which is the easy way of using them to fit the data of a wide range of features are discussed here. Finally, some major weakness of using SVM in clustering for NTL identification are identified, which leads to motivate for the scope of Optimum-Path Forest, a new model of NTL identification