Automating Data Exploration SciPy 2016

Editor's Notes

1. We did the simplest possible thing – plot the number of customers who had meter readings of 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. – all the way up to 300 and beyond. (Effectively, we drew a histogram.) As expected, it was log-normal. Relatively few users with low meter readings, and few with high meter readings. But what was striking were the spikes – at 50 units, 100 units, 200 units and 300 units – precisely at the slab boundaries. Given the metering system, there is a strong economic incentive to stay at or within a slab boundary. Exceeding it increases the unit rate. However, there are two ways this could happen. Either the consumer watches their meter carefully, and the instant it hits 100, stops using their lights and fans – or a certain amount of money changes hands. It was easy to see from this that there was fraud happening, but what stumped us were the spikes at 10, 20, 30, 40, etc. Here, there’s no economic incentive. There’s no significant difference between a meter reading of 10 vs 11, so there was no incentive to commit fraud. However, we later learnt that we were looking at this the wrong way. This was not a case of fraud, but of laziness. These were the meter readings taken by staff that never visited the premises, and were cooking up numbers. When people cook up numbers, they cook up round numbers. (An official said that he had to let go of one person who had not taken readings in a colony of houses for as long as six months. “Sir, there’s a pack of dogs in the colony” was his official statement.) The other question is, what is the nature of this fraudulent contract. Is it monthly? The meter reading guy appears and charges a small sum to adjust the reading? Or is it an annual contract that’s paid upfront? We looked at the meter readings of some of the people who were consistently at the slab boundaries. For example, the table in the middle has the readings of 10 customers, one per row. In the first row, the readings are consistently at 200 for 9 of the 12 months. However, there’s a spike in Jan-11 to 350 units. This indicated a monthly contract with a failure to pay in just one month. However, we later learnt that many of the people on this list were famous personalities. In fact, the lady in the first row had an event at their place in Jan-11, and the actual reading was expected to be well over a thousand units. But since the electricity board has a policy of not often auditing those that were in the highest slab (above 300), a more likely explanation was a collusion of the lineman with the customer to place her in the highest slab just this month, to avoid scrutiny. Lastly, we were examining the level at which fraud can be controlled. The last table above shows the extent of fraud of each section in one city, month on month. (The extent of fraud can be measured by the relative height of the spikes compared to the expected value.) Sections vary in the level of fraud, with Section 1 having significantly more fraud than Section 9. We also observe that fraud generally decreases in the winter season (Dec – Feb) when the need for cooling is less. But what’s most striking is the negative fraud in Section 5 in Jun-10. It stays low for a couple of months, and then, as if to compensate, shoots up to 82% in Sep-10. We learnt that this coincided with the appointment and transfer of a new section manager – under whose “regime”, fraud seems to have been dramatically controlled. It appears that a good organisation level to control fraud is at the 5,000 people strong section manager level, rather than the 100,000 people strong staff level.