Aberration detection in electricity consumption using clustering technique

Purpose – This paper aims to detect abnormal energy uses which relate to undetected consumption, thefts, measurement errors, etc. The detection of irregular power consumption, with variation in irregularities, helps the electric utilities in planning and making strategies to transfer reliable and efficient electricity from generators to the end-users. Abnormal peak load demand is a kind of aberration that needs to be detected. Design/methodology/approach – This paper proposes a Density-Based Micro Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBMSCAN) clustering algorithm, which is implemented for identification of ranked irregular electricity consumption and occurrence of peak and valley loads. In the proposed algorithm, two parameters, a and ß, are introduced, and, on tuning of these parameters, after setting of global parameters, a varied number of micro-clusters and ranked irregular consumptions, respectively, are obtained. An approach is incorporated with the introduction of a new term Irregularity Variance in the suggested algorithm to find variation in the irregular consumptions according to anomalous behaviors. Findings – No set of global parameters in DBSCAN is found in clustering of load pattern data of a practical system as the data. The proposed DBMSCAN approach finds clustering results and ranked irregular consumption such as different types of abnormal peak demands, sudden change in the demand, nearly zero demand, etc. with computational ease without any iterative control method. Originality/value – The DBMSCAN can be applied on any data set to find ranked outliers. It is an unsupervised approach of clustering technique to find the clustering results and ranked irregular consumptions while focusing on the analysis of and variations in anomalous behaviors in electricity consumption.