Big data analytics: an aid to detection of non-technical losses in power utilities

The great amount of data collected by the Advanced Metering Infrastructure can help electric utilities to detect energy theft, a phenomenon that globally costs over 25 billions of dollars per year. To address this challenge, this paper describes a new approach to non-technical loss analysis in power utilities using a variant of the P2P computing that allows identifying frauds in the absence of total reachability of smart meters. Specifically, the proposed approach compares data recorded by the smart meters and by the collector in the same neighborhood area and detects the fraudulent customers through the application of a Multiple Linear Regression model. Using real utility data, the regression model has been compared with other data mining techniques such as SVM, neural networks and logistic regression, in order to validate the proposed approach. The empirical results show that the Multiple Linear Regression model can efficiently identify the energy thieves even in areas with problems of meters reachability.