Evaluation of distribution fault diagnosis algorithms using ROC curves

In power distribution fault data, the percentage of faults with different causes could be very different and varies from region to region. This data imbalance issue seriously affects the performance evaluation of fault diagnosis algorithms. Due to the limitations of conventional accuracy (ACC) and geometric mean (G-mean) measures, this paper discusses the application of Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves in evaluating distribution fault diagnosis performance. After introducing how to obtain ROC curves, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Artificial Immune Recognition Systems (AIRS), and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithm are compared using ROC curves and Area Under the Curve (AUC) on real-world fault datasets from Progress Energy Carolinas. Experimental results show that AIRS performs best most of the time and ANN is potentially a good algorithm with a proper decision threshold.