Anomaly Detection and Classification of Household Electricity Data: A Time Window and Multilayer Hierarchical Network Approach

With the increasing popularity of the smart grid, huge volumes of data are gathered from numerous sensors. How to classify, store, and analyze massive data sets to facilitate the development of the smart grid has recently attracted much attention. In particular, with the popularity of household smart meters and electricity monitoring sensors, a large amount of data can be obtained to analyze household electricity usage so as to better diagnose the leakage and theft behaviors, identify man-made tampering and data fraud, and detect powerline loss. In this article, the time window method is first proposed to obtain the features and potential periodicity of household electricity data. Combining the denoising ability of the autoencoder and the induction ability of the feedforward neural network, a multilayer hierarchical network (MLHN) is then established to detect anomalies in single sensor data and classify multiple groups of sensor data, respectively. The experimental results show that the accuracy of detecting abnormal data and data classification is significantly improved compared with the presented scheme.