A Detection Method for Group Fixed Ratio Electricity Thieves Based on Correlation Analysis of Non-Technical Loss

Owing to the contagiousness of theft behaviors among customers, collaborative energy theft, such as village fraud, has become particularly common. In this study, a bunch of electricity thieves that steal energy at a constant ratio were considered. Conventional correlation-sorting-based methods may have some trouble handling these electricity thieves when they exist in the same area. To overcome such limitation, we firstly establish the mathematical model of non-technical loss (NTL) and the load data of fixed ratio electricity thieves (FRETs). Subsequently, an interesting correlation trend, which can be exploited to locate FRETs, was observed and analyzed. Based on this trend, we propose a correlation analysis-based detection method. It adopts a standardized covariance to measure the correlation between the NTL and user data. The detection of FRETs is realized by solving a combinatorial optimization problem. A corresponding framework in practice was also designed. Finally, numerical experiments based on a realistic dataset and an electricity theft dataset from an electricity theft emulator (ETE) are conducted to validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method in terms of accuracy, stability, and scalability.