Supervised and Unsupervised Neural Networks: Experimental Study for Anomaly Detection in Electrical Consumption

Households are responsible for more than 40% of the global electricity consumption [7]. The analysis of this consumption to find unexpected behaviours could have a great impact on saving electricity. This research presents an experimental study of supervised and unsupervised neural networks for anomaly detection in electrical consumption. Multilayer perceptrons and autoencoders are used for each approach, respectively. In order to select the most suitable neural model in each case, there is a comparison of various architectures. The proposed methods are evaluated using real-world data from an individual home electric power usage dataset. The performance is compared with a traditional statistical procedure. Experiments show that the supervised approach has a significant improvement in anomaly detection rate. We evaluate different possible feature sets. The results demonstrate that temporal data and measures of consumption patterns such as mean, standard deviation and percentiles are necessary to achieve higher accuracy.