**A Novel Electricity Theft Detection Scheme Based on Text Convolutional Neural Networks**

**Xiaofeng Feng 1, Hengyu Hui 2,\*, Ziyang Liang 2, Wenchong Guo 1, Huakun Que 1, Haoyang Feng 1, Yu Yao 2, Chengjin Ye 2 and Yi Ding 2**


Received: 30 September 2020; Accepted: 30 October 2020; Published: 3 November 2020

**Abstract:** Electricity theft decreases electricity revenues and brings risks to power usage's safety, which has been increasingly challenging nowadays. As the mainstream in the relevant studies, the state-of-the-art data-driven approaches mainly detect electricity theft events from the perspective of the correlations between di fferent daily or weekly loads, which is relatively inadequate to extract features from hours or more of fine-grained temporal data. In view of the above deficiencies, we propose a novel electricity theft detection scheme based on text convolutional neural networks (TextCNN). Specifically, we convert electricity consumption measurements over a horizon of interest into a two-dimensional time-series containing the intraday electricity features. Based on the data structure, the proposed method can accurately capture various periodical features of electricity consumption. Moreover, a data augmentation method is proposed to cope with the imbalance of electricity theft data. Extensive experimental results based on realistic Chinese and Irish datasets indicate that the proposed model achieves a better performance compared with other existing methods.

**Keywords:** data-driven approaches; electricity theft detection; smart meters; text convolutional neural networks (TextCNN); time-series classification
