Genetic Artificial Hummingbird Algorithm-Support Vector Machine for Timely Power Theft Detection.

Utilities face serious obstacles from power theft, which calls for creative ways to maintain income and improve operational effectiveness. This study presents a novel hybrid genetic artificial hummingbird algorithm-support vector machine classifier to detect power theft. The proposed algorithm combines the artificial hummingbird algorithm exploration phase with the genetic algorithm's mutation and crossover operators, to optimize the support vector machine's hyperparameters and categorize users as fraudulent or nonfraudulent. It utilizes 7,270 rows of labeled historical electricity consumption data from the Liberia Electricity Corporation over 15 independent runs. The methodology entailed data preprocessing, data split into training, validation, and testing sets in an 80-10-10 ratio, z-score normalization, optimization, training, validation, testing, and computation of six evaluation metrics. Its performance is compared with 13 metaheuristic classifiers and the conventional support vector machine. Findings indicate that the genetic artificial hummingbird algorithm-support vector machine outperforms the 13 rivals and the standard support vector machine in the six assessment measures with an accuracy score of 0.9986, precision of 0.9971,