ToU Pricing-Based Dynamic Electricity Theft Detection in Smart Grid Using Gradient Boosting Classifier

In the near future, it is highly expected that smart grid (SG) utilities will replace existing fixed pricing with dynamic pricing, such as time-of-use real-time tariff (ToU). In ToU, the price of electricity varies throughout the whole day based on the respective utilities’ decisions. We classify the whole day into two periods with very high and low probabilities of theft activities, termed as the “theft window” and “non-theft window”, respectively. A “smart” malicious consumer can adjust his/her theft to mostly targeting the theft window, manipulate actual usage reporting to outsmart existing theft detectors, and achieve the goal of “paying reduced tariff”. Simulation results show that existing schemes do not detect well such window-based theft activities conversely exploiting ToU strategies. In this paper, we begin by introducing the core concept of window-based theft cases, which is defined at the basis of ToU pricing as well as consumption usage. A modified extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) based machine learning (ML) technique called dynamic electricity theft detector (DETD) has been presented to detect a new type of theft cases.