Large-Scale Detection of Non-Technical Losses in Imbalanced Data Sets

Non-technical losses (NTL) such as electricity theft cause significant harm to our economies, as in some countries they may range up to 40% of the total electricity distributed. Detecting NTLs requires costly on-site inspections. Accurate prediction of NTLs for customers using machine learning is therefore crucial. To date, related research largely ignore that the two classes of regular and non-regular customers are highly imbalanced, that NTL proportions may change and mostly consider small data sets, often not allowing to deploy the results in production. In this paper, we present a comprehensive approach to assess three NTL detection models for different NTL proportions in large real world data sets of 100Ks of customers: Boolean rules, fuzzy logic and Support Vector Machine. This work has resulted in appreciable results that are about to be deployed in a leading industry solution. We believe that the considerations and observations made in this contribution are necessary for future smart meter research in order to report their effectiveness on imbalanced and large real world data sets.Comment: Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE Conference on Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT 2016

Predicting customer's gender and age depending on mobile phone data

In the age of data driven solution, the customer demographic attributes, such as gender and age, play a core role that may enable companies to enhance the offers of their services and target the right customer in the right time and place. In the marketing campaign, the companies want to target the real user of the GSM (global system for mobile communications), not the line owner. Where sometimes they may not be the same. This work proposes a method that predicts users' gender and age based on their behavior, services and contract information. We used call detail records (CDRs), customer relationship management (CRM) and billing information as a data source to analyze telecom customer behavior, and applied different types of machine learning algorithms to provide marketing campaigns with more accurate information about customer demographic attributes. This model is built using reliable data set of 18,000 users provided by SyriaTel Telecom Company, for training and testing. The model applied by using big data technology and achieved 85.6% accuracy in terms of user gender prediction and 65.5% of user age prediction. The main contribution of this work is the improvement in the accuracy in terms of user gender prediction and user age prediction based on mobile phone data and end-to-end solution that approaches customer data from multiple aspects in the telecom domain