Improving electricity non technical losses detection including neighborhood information

Non technical losses (NTL) cause significant damage to power supply companies' economies. Detecting abnormal clients behavior is an important and difficult task. In this paper we analyze the impact of considering customers geo-localization information, in automatic NTL detection. A methodology to find optimal grid sizes to compute a set of local features with a random search procedure is proposed. The number and size of the grids, and other classification algorithm parameters are adjusted to maximize the area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), showing performance improvements in a data set of 6 thousand of Uruguayan residential customers. Comparative analysis with different sub-sets of characteristics, that include the monthly consumption, contractual information and the new local features are presented. In addition, we probe that raw customers' geographical location used as an input feature, gives competitive results as well. In addition we evaluate a entire new database of 6 thousand Uruguayan customers, whom were inspected in-site by UTE experts between 2015 and 2017.