Ensemble learning based transmission line fault classification using phasor measurement unit (PMU) data with explainable AI (XAI)

A large volume of data is being captured through the Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU), which opens new opportunities and challenges to the study of transmission line faults. To be specific, the Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) data represents many different states of the power networks. The states of the PMU device help to identify different types of transmission line faults. For a precise understanding of transmission line faults, only the parameters that contain voltage and current magnitude estimations are not sufficient. This requirement has been addressed by generating data with more parameters such as frequencies and phase angles utilizing the Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) for data acquisition. The data has been generated through the simulation of a transmission line model on ePMU DSA tools and Matlab Simulink. Different machine learning models have been trained with the generated synthetic data to classify transmission line fault cases. The individual models including Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), and K-Nearest Neighbor (K-NN) have outperformed other models in fault classification which have acquired a cross-validation accuracy of 99.84%, 99.83%, and 99.76% respectively across 10 folds. Soft voting has been used to combine the performance of these best-performing models. Accordingly, the constructed ensemble model has acquired a cross-validation accuracy of 99.88% across 10 folds. The performance of the combined models in the ensemble learning process has been analyzed through explainable AI (XAI) which increases the interpretability of the input parameters in terms of making predictions. Consequently, the developed model has been evaluated with several performance matrices, such as precision, recall, and f1 score, and also tested on the IEEE 14 bus system. To sum up, this article has demonstrated the classification of six scenarios including no fault and fault cases from transmission lines with a significant number of training parameters and also interpreted the effect of each parameter to make predictions of different fault cases with great success.