Abstract
Obtaining outstanding electricity theft detection (ETD) performance in the realm of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and smart grids (SGs) is quite difficult due to various issues. The issues include limited availability of theft data as compared to benign data, neglecting dimensionality reduction, usage of the standalone (single) electricity theft detectors, etc. These issues lead the classification techniques to low accuracy, minimum precision, low F1 score, and overfitting problems. For these reasons, it is extremely crucial to design such a novel strategy that is capable to tackle these issues and yield outstanding ETD performance. In this article, electricity theft happening in SGs is detected using a novel ETD approach. The proposed approach comprises recursive feature elimination (RFE), k nearest neighbor oversampling (KNNOR), bidirectional long short term memory (BiLSTM), and logit boosting (LogitBoost) techniques. Furthermore, three BiLSTM networks and a LogitBoost model are combined to make a BiLSTM-LogitBoost stacking ensemble model. Data preprocessing and feature selection followed by data balancing and electricity theft classification are the four major stages of the model proposed for ETD. It is obvious from the simulations performed using state grid corporation of China (SGCC)'s electricity consumption (EC) data that our proposed model achieves 96.32% precision, 94.33% F1 score, and 89.45% accuracy, which are higher than all the benchmarks employed in this study.