Electricity Theft Detection of Residential Users With Correlation of Water and Electricity Usage

Electricity theft users with zero electricity usage (UZEU) should be specifically concerned in electricity theft detection (ETD) research. The challenges are: they provide no effective information on electricity usage behaviors, and they are easily confused with vacant house users. This has caused the majority of the existing detection methods relying on single electricity usage to fail to identify UZEU accurately. Hence, this article first analyzes the underlying correlation between water and electricity (W&E) usage collected by the smart meter. This analysis then lends the theoretical basis to propose a new ETD method by comprehensively using the multisource information. More precisely, the proposed method utilizes the mutual information coefficient (MIC) to construct a correlation model between W&E usage and in turn the wavelet clustering algorithm to cluster the MIC of the power distribution users. Thereafter, the resulting weak correlations indicate the suspected users as the electricity theft UZEU in case of zero electricity usage. Finally, the proposed method is validated by numerical experiments in the real world and illustrated to be more accurate than existing methods in detecting UZEU.