Unsupervised Anomaly Detection on Time Series Data: An Implementation on Electricity Consumption Series

Sammanfattning: Digitization of the energy industry, introduction of smart grids and increasing regulation of electricity consumption metering have resulted in vast amounts of electricity data. This data presents a unique opportunity to understand the electricity usage and to make it more efficient, reducing electricity consumption and carbon emissions. An important initial step in analyzing the data is to identify anomalies. In this thesis the problem of anomaly detection in electricity consumption series is addressed using four machine learning methods: density based spatial clustering for applications with noise (DBSCAN), local outlier factor (LOF), isolation forest (iForest) and one-class support vector machine (OC-SVM). In order to evaluate the methods synthetic anomalies were introduced to the electricity consumption series and the methods were then evaluated for the two anomaly types point anomaly and collective anomaly. In addition to electricity consumption data, features describing the prior consumption, outdoor temperature and date-time properties were included in the models. Results indicate that the addition of the temperature feature and the lag features generally impaired anomaly detection performance, while the inclusion of date-time features improved it. Of the four methods, OC-SVM was found to perform the best at detecting point anomalies, while LOF performed the best at detecting collective anomalies. In an attempt to improve the models' detection power the electricity consumption series were de-trended and de-seasonalized and the same experiments were carried out. The models did not perform better on the decomposed series than on the non-decomposed.