Abstract
Energy consumption is increasing exponentially with the increase in electronic gadgets. Losses occur during generation, transmission, and distribution. The energy demand leads to increase in electricity theft (ET) in distribution side. Data analysis is the process of assessing the data using different analytical and statistical tools to extract useful information. Fluctuation in energy consumption patterns indicates electricity theft. Utilities bear losses of millions of dollar every year. Hardware-based solutions are considered to be the best; however, the deployment cost of these solutions is high. Software-based solutions are data-driven and cost-effective. We need big data for analysis and artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. Several solutions have been proposed in existing studies; however, low detection performance and high false positive rate are the major issues. In this paper, we first time employ bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit for ET detection for classification using real time-series data. We also propose a new scheme, which is a combination of oversampling technique Synthetic Minority Oversampling TEchnique (SMOTE) and undersampling technique Tomek Link: "Smote Over Sampling Tomik Link (SOSTLink) sampling technique". The Kernel Principal Component Analysis is used for feature extraction. In order to evaluate the proposed model's performance, five performance metrics are used, including precision, recall, F1-score, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and receiver operating characteristic curve. Experiments show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques: logistic regression, decision tree, random forest, support vector machine, convolutional neural network, long short-term memory, hybrid of multilayer perceptron and convolutional neural network.