Enhancing Smart City Functions through the Mitigation of Electricity Theft in Smart Grids: A Stacked Ensemble Method

Smart grid is the primary stakeholder in smart cities integrated with modern technologies as the Internet of Things (IoT), smart healthcare systems, industrial IoT, renewable energy, energy communities, and the 6G network. Smart grids provide bidirectional power and information flow by integrating many IoT devices and software. These advanced IOTs and cyber layers introduced new types of vulnerabilities and could compromise the stability of smart grids. Some anomalous consumers leverage these vulnerabilities, launch theft attacks on the power system, and steal electricity to lower their electricity bills. The recent developments in numerous detection methods have been supported by cutting-edge machine learning (ML) approaches. Even so, these recent developments are practically not robust enough because of the limitations of single ML approaches employed. This research introduced a stacked ensemble method for electricity theft detection (ETD) in a smart grid. The framework detects anomalous consumers in two stages; in the first stage, four powerful classifiers are stacked and detect suspicious activity, and the output of these consumers is fed to a single classifier for the second-stage classification to get better results. Furthermore, we incorporate kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) and localized random affine shadow sampling (LoRAS) for feature engineering and data augmentation. We also perform comparative analysis using adaptive synthesis (ADASYN) and independent component analysis (ICA). The simulation findings reveal that the proposed model outperforms with 97% accuracy, 97% AUC score, and 98% precision.