Abstract
Energy theft causes a lot of economic losses every year. In the practical environment of energy theft detection, it is required to solve imbalanced data problem where normal user data are significantly larger than energy theft data. In this paper, a variational autoencoder-generative adversarial network (VAE-GAN)-based energy theft-detection model is proposed to overcome the imbalanced data problem. In the proposed model, the VAE-GAN generates synthetic energy theft data with the features of real energy theft data for augmenting the energy theft dataset. The obtained balanced dataset is applied to train a detector which is designed as one-dimensional convolutional neural network. The proposed model is simulated on the practical dataset for comparing with various generative models to evaluate their performance. From simulation results, it is confirmed that the proposed model outperforms the other existing models. Additionally, it is shown that the proposed model is also very useful in the environments of extreme data imbalance for a wide variety of applications by analyzing the performance of detector according to the balance rate.