Distribution Grid Line Outage Detection with Privacy Data

Change point detection is important for many real-world applications. While sensor readings enable line outage identification, they bring privacy concerns by allowing an adversary to divulge sensitive information such as household occupancy and economic status. In this paper, to preserve privacy, we develop a decentralized randomizing scheme to ensure no direct exposure of each user's raw data. Brought by the randomizing scheme, the trade-off between privacy gain and degradation of change point detection performance is quantified via studying the differential privacy framework and the Kullback-Leibler divergence. Furthermore, we propose a novel statistic to mitigate the impact of randomness, making our detection procedure both privacy-preserving and have optimal performance. The results of comprehensive experiments show that our proposed framework can effectively find the outage with privacy guarantees.