FL2ETD: A Few-Shot Learning Framework to Electricity Theft Detection

Electricity theft detection (ETD) aims to promptly identify electricity theft by vigilantly monitoring and analyzing atypical electricity consumption time series. Existing machine learning approaches to ETD demand large training sets, leading to degraded performance when limited training samples are available. In this paper, we introduce FL2ETD, a novel few-shot learning framework to ETD. The framework consists of three core components, i.e., a feature extraction module, a representation module, and a classification module. The feature extraction module processes the electricity consumption behavior of users in both the time and the frequency domains to extract distinctive features and increase the number and the diversity of features. The representation module utilizes contrast learning to pre-train unlabeled electricity consumption data for enhancing feature representation quality. The classification module integrates feature representations for making the final decision in ETD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FL2ETD exhibits superior performance compared to baselines, and its advantage is significant when the number of available training samples is very small (with only 338 samples).