Fraud Detection of Electricity Consumption Using Robust Exponential and Holt-Winters Smoothing Method

Abstract

Non-technical losses (NTL), especially fraud detection is very important for electricity distribution enterprises. Fraud detection allows for maximizing the effective economic return for such enterprises. This paper provides an electricity fraud detection approach based on robust exponential and Holt-Winters Smoothing methods. The proposed approach is a procedure that aims to discover the fraudulent behavior of electricity consumers and goes through three crucial steps: (1) the prediction of monthly consumption, (2) the detection of abnormal consumption of electrical meters, and (3) the detection of fraud cases of economic customers. The proposed model was trained and evaluated. Its experimental validation is achieved by using a large dataset of real users from the Algerian economic sector with almost 2000 clients and 14 years of monthly electricity consumption. The proposed solution revealed good performance compared to the literature and the comparison with the models implemented in this article: SARIMA for prediction and two sigma for anomaly detection. The results show highly efficient and realistic countermeasures to fraud detection, which leads us to say that this method is robust and can enhance company profit.