Behavioral analysis of electricity consumption characteristics for customer groups using the k-means algorithm

• The determination methods for cluster number and initial clustering centers in the k-means algorithm are optimized. • The clustering performance of the improved k-means algorithm is verified by experiments on the UCI dataset. • Electricity customer groups are effectively classified using the improved k-means algorithm. In the fierce competition of the electricity market, how to consolidate and develop customers is particularly important. Aiming to analyze the electricity consumption characteristics of customer groups, this paper used a k-means algorithm and optimized it. The number of clusters was determined by the Davies-Bouldin index (DBI). An improved Harris Hawks optimization (IHHO) algorithm was designed to realize the initial cluster center selection. Based on data such as electricity purchase and average electricity price, electricity customer groups were clustered using the IHHO-k-means algorithm. The IHHO-k-means algorithm achieved the best clustering effect on Iris, Wine, and Glass datasets compared with the traditional k-means and PSO-k-means algorithms. Taking Iris as an example, the optimal value of the IHHO-k-means algorithm was 96.538, with an accuracy rate of 0.932, precision and recall rates of 0.941 and 0.793, respectively, an F-measure of 0.861, and an area under the curve (AUC) value of 0.851. In the customer dataset, the number of clusters determined by DBI was 4. The power customers were divided into four groups with different characteristics of electricity consumption, and their electricity consumption behaviors were analyzed. The results prove the reliability of the IHHO-k-means algorithm in analyzing electricity consumption characteristics of customer groups, and it can be applied in practice.