Performance Analysis of Electricity Theft Detection for the Smart Grid: An Overview

Electricity theft has been a growing concern for the smart grid. It can be defined as illegal customers use energy from electric utilities without a contract or manipulate their meter readings to pay less or not pay electricity bill. Over the past decade, significant researches have been done to prevent and combat theft. This paper aims to provide a general overview of the progress of electricity theft detection, including threat models, datasets and input features adopted, methodologies and techniques, and evaluation metrics. We also make a performance comparison for each detection method. Finally, the challenges and future research directions are presented in this paper.