Abstract
In this paper, we present a hybrid deep learning model that is based on a two-dimensional convolutional neural network (2D-CNN) and a bidirectional long short-term memory network (Bi-LSTM)to detect non-technical losses (NTLs) in smart meters. NTLs occur due to the fraudulent use of electricity. The global integration of smart meters has proven to be beneficial for the storage of historical electricity consumption (EC) data. The proposed methodology learns the deep insights from the historical EC data and informs power utilities about the presence of NTLs. However, the effective detection of NTLs faces the problem of class imbalance that occurs due to the rare availability of fraudulent electricity consumers. To solve this issue, an evolutionary bidirectional Wasserstein generative adversarial network (Bi-WGAN) is employed. Bi-WGAN synthesizes the most plausible fraudulent EC samples by integrating an auxiliary encoder module. Besides, the inevitable curse of high dimensional data reduces the generalization ability of classifiers. The proposed hybrid model efficiently handles the highly dynamic data by utilizing its potent feature extracting capabilities. The one-dimensional daily EC data is passed to Bi-LSTM model for capturing the non-malicious changes from consumers' profiles. Meanwhile, 2D-CNN takes 2D weekly EC data as input to extract the potential features by applying different convolutions and pooling operations. Extensive experiments are conducted on a realistic smart meters dataset to prove the effectiveness of the proposed model. The results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models by achieving area under the curve receiver operating characteristics of 0.97 and precision-recall area under the curve of 0.98, which make it suitable for real-world scenarios.