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Abstract The availability of large datasets is crucial for the development of new power system applications and tools; unfortunately, very few are publicly and freely available. The authors designed an end‐to‐end generative framework for the creation of synthetic bus‐level time‐series load data for transmission networks. The model is trained on a real dataset of over 70 Terabytes of synchrophasor measurements spanning multiple years. Leveraging a combination of principal component analysis and conditional generative adversarial network models, the developed scheme allows for the generation of data at varying sampling rates (up to a maximum of 30 samples per second) and ranging in length from seconds to years. The generative models are tested extensively to verify that they correctly capture the diverse characteristics of real loads. Finally, an opensource tool called LoadGAN is developed which gives researchers access to the fully trained generative models via a graphical interface.

In this study, a machine learning based method is proposed for creating synthetic eventful phasor measurement unit (PMU) data under time-varying load conditions. The proposed method leverages generative adversarial networks to create quasi-steady states for the power system under slowly-varying load conditions and incorporates a framework of neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to capture the transient behaviors of the system during voltage oscillation events. A numerical example of a large power grid suggests that this method can create realistic synthetic eventful PMU voltage measurements based on the associated real PMU data without any knowledge of the underlying nonlinear dynamic equations. The results demonstrate that the synthetic voltage measurements have the key characteristics of real system behavior on distinct time scales.

A nearest-neighbor-based detector against load redistribution attacks is presented. The detector is designed to scale from small-scale to very large-scale systems while guaranteeing consistent detection performance. Extensive testing is performed on a realistic large-scale system to evaluate the performance of the proposed detector against a wide range of attacks, from simple random noise attacks to sophisticated load redistribution attacks. The detection capability is analyzed against different attack parameters to evaluate its sensitivity. A statistical test that leverages the proposed detector is introduced to identify which loads are likely to have been maliciously modified, thus, localizing the attack subgraph. This test is based on ascribing to each load a risk measure (probability of being attacked) and then computing the best posterior likelihood that minimizes log-loss.

A machine learning-based detection framework is proposed to detect a class of cyber-attacks that redistribute loads by modifying measurements. The detection framework consists of a multi-output support vector regression (SVR) load predictor and a subsequent support vector machine (SVM) attack detector to determine the existence of load redistribution (LR) attacks utilising loads predicted by the SVR predictor. Historical load data for training the SVR are obtained from the publicly available PJM zonal loads and are mapped to the IEEE 30-bus system. The features to predict loads are carefully extracted from the historical load data capturing both temporal and spatial correlations. The SVM attack detector is trained using normal data and randomly created LR attacks so that it can maximally explore the attack space. An algorithm to create random LR attacks is introduced. The results show that the SVM detector trained merely using random attacks can effectively detect not only random attacks but also intelligently designed attacks. Moreover, using the SVR predicted loads to re-dispatch generation when attacks are detected can significantly mitigate the attack consequences.

Businesses (retailers) often wish to offer personalized advertisements (coupons) to individuals (consumers), but run the risk of strong reactions from consumers who want a customized shopping experience but feel their privacy has been violated. Existing models for privacy such as differential privacy or information theory try to quantify privacy risk but do not capture the subjective experience and heterogeneous expression of privacy-sensitivity. We propose a Markov decision process (MDP) model to capture (i) different consumer privacy sensitivities via a time-varying state; (ii) different coupon types (action set) for the retailer; and (iii) the action-and-state-dependent cost for perceived privacy violations. For the simple case with two states ("Normal" and "Alerted"), two coupons (targeted and untargeted) model, and consumer behavior statistics known to the retailer, we show that a stationary threshold-based policy is the optimal coupon-offering strategy for a retailer that wishes to minimize its expected discounted cost. The threshold is a function of all model parameters; the retailer offers a targeted coupon if its belief that the consumer is in the "Alerted" state is below the threshold. We extend this two-state model to consumers with multiple privacy-sensitivity states as well as coupon-dependent state transition probabilities. Furthermore, we study the case with imperfect (noisy) cost feedback from consumers and uncertain initial belief state.

Preserving the utility of published datasets while simultaneously providing provable privacy guarantees is a well-known challenge. On the one hand, context-free privacy solutions, such as differential privacy, provide strong privacy guarantees, but often lead to a significant reduction in utility. On the other hand, context-aware privacy solutions, such as information theoretic privacy, achieve an improved privacy-utility tradeoff, but assume that the data holder has access to dataset statistics. We circumvent these limitations by introducing a novel context-aware privacy framework called generative adversarial privacy (GAP). GAP leverages recent advancements in generative adversarial networks (GANs) to allow the data holder to learn privatization schemes from the dataset itself. Under GAP, learning the privacy mechanism is formulated as a constrained minimax game between two players: a privatizer that sanitizes the dataset in a way that limits the risk of inference attacks on the individuals’ private variables, and an adversary that tries to infer the private variables from the sanitized dataset. To evaluate GAP’s performance, we investigate two simple (yet canonical) statistical dataset models: (a) the binary data model; and (b) the binary Gaussian mixture model. For both models, we derive game-theoretically optimal minimax privacy mechanisms, and show that the privacy mechanisms learned from data (in a generative adversarial fashion) match the theoretically optimal ones. This demonstrates that our framework can be easily applied in practice, even in the absence of dataset statistics.