Bayesian Network Representation of Meaningful Patterns in Electricity Distribution Grids

The diversity of components in electricity distribution grids makes it impossible, or at least very expensive, to deploy monitoring and fault diagnostics to every individual element. Therefore, power distribution companies are looking for cheap and reliable approaches that can help them to estimate the condition of their assets and to predict the when and where the faults may occur. In this paper we propose a simplified representation of failure patterns within historical faults database, which facilitates visualization of association rules using Bayesian Networks. Our approach is based on exploring the failure history and detecting correlations between different features available in those records. We show that a small subset of the most interesting rules is enough to obtain a good and sufficiently accurate approximation of the original dataset. A Bayesian Network created from those rules can serve as an easy to understand visualization of the most relevant failure patterns. In addition, by varying the threshold values of support and confidence that we consider interesting, we are able to control the tradeoff between accuracy of the model and its complexity in an intuitive way.