Towards Secure and Scalable Energy Theft Detection: A Federated Learning Approach for Resource-Constrained Smart Meters
This addresses privacy and computational constraints for resource-constrained smart meters in smart grids, though it is incremental as it combines existing techniques.
The paper tackles energy theft detection in smart grids by proposing a federated learning framework with differential privacy, achieving competitive accuracy, precision, recall, and AUC scores on real-world data under IID and non-IID distributions.
Energy theft poses a significant threat to the stability and efficiency of smart grids, leading to substantial economic losses and operational challenges. Traditional centralized machine learning approaches for theft detection require aggregating user data, raising serious concerns about privacy and data security. These issues are further exacerbated in smart meter environments, where devices are often resource-constrained and lack the capacity to run heavy models. In this work, we propose a privacy-preserving federated learning framework for energy theft detection that addresses both privacy and computational constraints. Our approach leverages a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP) model, suitable for deployment on low-power smart meters, and integrates basic differential privacy (DP) by injecting Gaussian noise into local model updates before aggregation. This ensures formal privacy guarantees without compromising learning performance. We evaluate our framework on a real-world smart meter dataset under both IID and non-IID data distributions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive accuracy, precision, recall, and AUC scores while maintaining privacy and efficiency. This makes the proposed solution practical and scalable for secure energy theft detection in next-generation smart grid infrastructures.