The Challenge of Non-Technical Loss Detection using Artificial Intelligence: A Survey

Detection of non-technical losses (NTL) which include electricity theft, faulty meters or billing errors has attracted increasing attention from researchers in electrical engineering and computer science. NTLs cause significant harm to the economy, as in some countries they may range up to 40% of the total electricity distributed. The predominant research direction is employing artificial intelligence to predict whether a customer causes NTL. This paper first provides an overview of how NTLs are defined and their impact on economies, which include loss of revenue and profit of electricity providers and decrease of the stability and reliability of electrical power grids. It then surveys the state-of-the-art research efforts in a up-to-date and comprehensive review of algorithms, features and data sets used. It finally identifies the key scientific and engineering challenges in NTL detection and suggests how they could be addressed in the future

Análise empírica da concordância nominal de número no português popular e culto de Vitória da Conquista – Ba (Empirical analysis of nominal number agreement in standard and substandard portuguese in Vitória da Conquista – Ba)

Neste trabalho, discutimos o fenômeno da variação na concordância nominal de número no português culto de Vitória da Conquista por meio de um registro sistematizado da fala dos informantes à luz da Teoria da Variação e Mudança. Apresentamos um estudo comparativo entre os dados por nós analisados e os dados analisados por Guimarães (2014), referentes ao português popular.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Concordância nominal de número. Estudo comparativo. Português popular. Português culto.  In this work, we discussthe phenomenon of the variation in the nominal number agreement in Standard and Substandard Portuguese in Vitória da Conquista – BA, Brazil, using the Theory of Variation and Change. We present a comparative study of the data we reviewed and analyzed by Guimarães (2014) for the Substandard Portuguese.KEYWORDS: Nominal number agreement. Comparative study. Popular Portuguese. Portuguese culture.Dans cet article, nous discutons du phénomène de variation de la concordance nominale du nombre dans le culte portugais Vitória da Conquista à travers un enregistrement systématique du discours des informateurs sur la théorie de la variation et du changement. Nous présentons une étude comparative des données que nous avons examinées et analysées par Guimarães (2014) pour le populaire portugais.MOTS-CLÉS: Accord de nombre nominal. Etude comparative. Portugais populaire. Culture portugaise.En este trabajo, se discute el fenómeno de la variación en el concordancia nominal de número en portugués Vitória da Conquista culto a través de un registro sistemático del discurso de los informantes a la Teoría de la variación y el cambio. Se presenta un estudio comparativo de los datos que revisar y analizar de Guimarães (2014) para el popular portuguesa.PALABRAS CLAVE: Concordancia nominal de número. Estudio comparativo. Portugués popular. Culto portugués

Detection of Irregular Power Usage using Machine Learning

Electricity losses are a frequently appearing problem in power grids. Non-technical losses (NTL) appear during distribution and include, but are not limited to, the following causes: Meter tampering in order to record lower consumptions, bypassing meters by rigging lines from the power source, arranged false meter readings by bribing meter readers, faulty or broken meters, un-metered supply, technical and human errors in meter readings, data processing and billing. NTLs are also reported to range up to 40% of the total electricity distributed in countries such as India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Brazil or Lebanon. This is an introductory level course to discuss how to predict if a customer causes a NTL. In the last years, employing data analytics methods such as machine learning and data mining have evolved as the primary direction to solve this problem. This course will present and compare different approaches reported in the literature. Practical case studies on real data sets will be included. As an additional outcome, attendees will understand the open challenges of NTL detection and learn how these challenges could be solved in the coming years

Machine Learning for Data-Driven Smart Grid Applications

The field of Machine Learning grew out of the quest for artificial intelligence. It gives computers the ability to learn statistical patterns from data without being explicitly programmed. These patterns can then be applied to new data in order to make predictions. Machine Learning also allows to automatically adapt to changes in the data without amending the underlying model. We deal every day dozens of times with Machine Learning applications such as when doing a Google search, using spam filters, face detection, speaking to voice recognition software or when sitting in a self-driving car. In recent years, machine learning methods have evolved in the smart grid community. This change towards analyzing data rather than modeling specific problems has lead to adaptable, more generic methods, that require less expert knowledge and that are easier to deploy in a number of use cases. This is an introductory level course to discuss what machine learning is and how to apply it to data-driven smart grid applications. Practical case studies on real data sets, such as load forecasting, detection of irregular power usage and visualization of customer data, will be included. Therefore, attendees will not only understand, but rather experience, how to apply machine learning methods to smart grid data

Introduction to Detection of Non-Technical Losses using Data Analytics

Electricity losses are a frequently appearing problem in power grids. Non-technical losses (NTL) appear during distribution and include, but are not limited to, the following causes: Meter tampering in order to record lower consumptions, bypassing meters by rigging lines from the power source, arranged false meter readings by bribing meter readers, faulty or broken meters, un-metered supply, technical and human errors in meter readings, data processing and billing. NTLs are also reported to range up to 40% of the total electricity distributed in countries such as Brazil, India, Malaysia or Lebanon. This is an introductory level course to discuss how to predict if a customer causes a NTL. In the last years, employing data analytics methods such as data mining and machine learning have evolved as the primary direction to solve this problem. This course will compare and contrast different approaches reported in the literature. Practical case studies on real data sets will be included. Therefore, attendees will not only understand, but rather experience the challenges of NTL detection and learn how these challenges could be solved in the coming years

An Elastic Multi-Core Allocation Mechanism for Database Systems

During the parallel execution of queries in Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) systems, he Operating System (OS) maps the threads (or processes) from modern database systems to the available cores among the NUMA nodes using the standard node-local policy. However, such non-smart mapping may result in inefficient memory activity, because shared data may be accessed by scattered threads requiring large data movements or non-shared data may be allocated to threads sharing the same cache memory, increasing its conflicts. In this paper we present a data-distribution aware and elastic multi-core allocation mechanism to improve the OS mapping of database threads in NUMA systems. Our hypothesis is that we mitigate the data movement if we only hand out to the OS the local optimum number of cores in specific nodes. We propose a mechanism based on a rule-condition-action pipeline that uses hardware counters to promptly find out the local optimum number of cores. Our mechanism uses a priority queue to track the history of the memory address space used by database threads in order to decide about the allocation/release of cores and its distribution among the NUMA nodes to decrease remote memory access. We implemented and tested a prototype of our mechanism when executing two popular Volcano-style databases improving their NUMA-affinity. For MonetDB, we show maximum speedup of 1.53 × , due to consistent reduction in the local/remote per-query data traffic ratio of up to 3.87 × running 256 concurrent clients in the 1 GB TPC-H database also showing system energy savings of 26.05%. For the NUMA-aware SQL Server, we observed speedup of up to 1.27 × and reduction on the data traffic ratio of 3.70 ×

Distilling Provider-Independent Data for General Detection of Non-Technical Losses

Non-technical losses (NTL) in electricity distribution are caused by different reasons, such as poor equipment maintenance, broken meters or electricity theft. NTL occurs especially but not exclusively in emerging countries. Developed countries, even though usually in smaller amounts, have to deal with NTL issues as well. In these countries the estimated annual losses are up to six billion USD. These facts have directed the focus of our work to the NTL detection. Our approach is composed of two steps: 1) We compute several features and combine them in sets characterized by four criteria: temporal, locality, similarity and infrastructure. 2) We then use the sets of features to train three machine learning classifiers: random forest, logistic regression and support vector vachine. Our hypothesis is that features derived only from provider-independent data are adequate for an accurate detection of non-technical losses

Identifying Irregular Power Usage by Turning Predictions into Holographic Spatial Visualizations

Power grids are critical infrastructure assets that face non-technical losses (NTL) such as electricity theft or faulty meters. NTL may range up to 40% of the total electricity distributed in emerging countries. Industrial NTL detection systems are still largely based on expert knowledge when deciding whether to carry out costly on-site inspections of customers. Electricity providers are reluctant to move to large-scale deployments of automated systems that learn NTL profiles from data due to the latter's propensity to suggest a large number of unnecessary inspections. In this paper, we propose a novel system that combines automated statistical decision making with expert knowledge. First, we propose a machine learning framework that classifies customers into NTL or non-NTL using a variety of features derived from the customers' consumption data. The methodology used is specifically tailored to the level of noise in the data. Second, in order to allow human experts to feed their knowledge in the decision loop, we propose a method for visualizing prediction results at various granularity levels in a spatial hologram. Our approach allows domain experts to put the classification results into the context of the data and to incorporate their knowledge for making the final decisions of which customers to inspect. This work has resulted in appreciable results on a real-world data set of 3.6M customers. Our system is being deployed in a commercial NTL detection software

VARIAÇÃO NA CONCORDÂNCIA NOMINAL DE NÚMERO NO PORTUGUÊS POPULAR E NO PORTUGUÊS CULTO DE VITÓRIA DA CONQUISTA-BA

No presente artigo discutimos a concordância nominal de número na perspectiva dos pressupostos teóricos e procedimentos metodológicos fornecidos pela Teoria da Variação e Mudança Linguística propostos por Weinreich, Labov e Herzog (2006) e Labov (2008). Utilizamos amostras de fala de 12 (doze) informantes do português culto cujos resultados foram comparados com os dados de 12 (doze) falantes do português popular. Os resultados por nós obtidos demonstram de forma inequívoca que o fenômeno da variabilidade nos constituintes do sintagma nominal pode ser verificado tanto na fala de pessoas escolarizadas quanto na fala de pessoas com pouca escolarização, embora nesse último caso a frequência tenha sido maior

The Top 10 Topics in Machine Learning Revisited: A Quantitative Meta-Study

Which topics of machine learning are most commonly addressed in research? This question was initially answered in 2007 by doing a qualitative survey among distinguished researchers. In our study, we revisit this question from a quantitative perspective. Concretely, we collect 54K abstracts of papers published between 2007 and 2016 in leading machine learning journals and conferences. We then use machine learning in order to determine the top 10 topics in machine learning. We not only include models, but provide a holistic view across optimization, data, features, etc. This quantitative approach allows reducing the bias of surveys. It reveals new and up-to-date insights into what the 10 most prolific topics in machine learning research are. This allows researchers to identify popular topics as well as new and rising topics for their research