Electricity theft (ET) is an utmost problem for power utilities because it threatens public safety, disturbs the normal working of grid infrastructure and increases revenue losses. In the literature, many machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL) and statistical based models are introduced to detect ET. However, these models do not give optimal results due to the following reasons: curse of dimensionality, class imbalance problem, inappropriate hyper-parameter tuning of ML and DL models, etc. Keeping the aforementioned concerns in view, we introduce a hybrid DL model for the efficient detection of electricity thieves in smart grids. AlexNet is utilized to handle the curse of dimensionality issue while the final classification of energy thieves and normal consumers is performed through adaptive boosting (AdaBoost). Moreover, class imbalance problem is resolved using an undersampling technique, named as near miss. Furthermore, hyper-parameters of AdaBoost and AlexNet are tuned using artificial bee colony optimization algorithm. The real smart meters’ dataset is used to assess the efficacy of the hybrid model. The substantial amount of simulations proves that the hybrid model obtains the highest classification results as compared to its counterparts. Our proposed model obtains 88%, 86%, 84%, 85%, 78% and 91% accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, Matthew correlation coefficient and area under the curve receiver operating characteristics, respectively.

Electricity theft is one of the challenging problems in smart grids. The power utilities around the globe face huge economic loss due to ET. The traditional electricity theft detection (ETD) models confront several challenges, such as highly imbalance distribution of electricity consumption data, curse of dimensionality and inevitable effects of non-malicious factors. To cope with the aforementioned concerns, this paper presents a novel ETD strategy for smart grids based on theft attacks, long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) called TLGRU. It includes three subunits: (1) synthetic theft attacks based data balancing, (2) LSTM based feature extraction, and (3) GRU based theft classification. GRU is used for drift identification. It stores and extracts the long-term dependency in the power consumption data. It is beneficial for drift identification. In this way, a minimum false positive rate (FPR) is obtained. Moreover, dropout regularization and Adam optimizer are added in GRU for tackling overfitting and trapping model in the local minima, respectively. The proposed TLGRU model uses the realistic EC profiles of the Chinese power utility state grid corporation of China for analysis and to solve the ETD problem. From the simulation results, it is exhibited that 1% FPR, 97.96% precision, 91.56% accuracy, and 91.68% area under curve for ETD are obtained by the proposed model. The proposed model outperforms the existing models in terms of ETD.

In this paper, we present a hybrid deep learning model that is based on a two-dimensional convolutional neural network (2D-CNN) and a bidirectional long short-term memory network (Bi-LSTM)to detect non-technical losses (NTLs) in smart meters. NTLs occur due to the fraudulent use of electricity. The global integration of smart meters has proven to be beneficial for the storage of historical electricity consumption (EC) data. The proposed methodology learns the deep insights from the historical EC data and informs power utilities about the presence of NTLs. However, the effective detection of NTLs faces the problem of class imbalance that occurs due to the rare availability of fraudulent electricity consumers. To solve this issue, an evolutionary bidirectional Wasserstein generative adversarial network (Bi-WGAN) is employed. Bi-WGAN synthesizes the most plausible fraudulent EC samples by integrating an auxiliary encoder module. Besides, the inevitable curse of high dimensional data reduces the generalization ability of classifiers. The proposed hybrid model efficiently handles the highly dynamic data by utilizing its potent feature extracting capabilities. The one-dimensional daily EC data is passed to Bi-LSTM model for capturing the non-malicious changes from consumers’ profiles. Meanwhile, 2D-CNN takes 2D weekly EC data as input to extract the potential features by applying different convolutions and pooling operations. Extensive experiments are conducted on a realistic smart meters dataset to prove the effectiveness of the proposed model. The results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models by achieving area under the curve receiver operating characteristics of 0.97 and precision-recall area under the curve of 0.98, which make it suitable for real-world scenarios.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of foreign shareholdings (FS) on agency cost and firm’s performance in non financial listed firms of the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX). The authors employed the data set of agency cost, FS and corporate governance from 2012 to 2016. According to the recent literature Foreign Shareholdings (FS) can also be used as a powerful remedy to mitigate the dual type of agency problems. This study uses two proxies for agency cost, i.e. AUR and DER, and one for firm performance, i.e. Tobin’s Q, as dependent variables. Foreign direct investment is used as an explanatory variable and twelve independent variables. The study found that a higher level of the FS decreases the agency cost level under the asset utilisation ratio. It implies that foreign investment can benefit from employed assets due to superior abilities and advanced technology. While under discretionary expenditure ratio, FS has not significantly influenced agency cost. It is also found that FS significantly increase market base performance. The findings clarified that foreign investors play an important role in reducing agency costs and improving firm performance. In addition, the empirical evidence drifted towards the critical policy implication for emerging markets to allow foreign investors to invest in their firms to obtain maximum gains.