Single-Phase Ground Fault Detection Method in Three-Phase Four-Wire Distribution Systems Using Optuna-Optimized TabNet

Single-phase ground (SPG) faults pose significant challenges in three-phase four-wire distribution systems due to their complex transient characteristics and the presence of multiple influencing factors. To solve the aforementioned issues, a comprehensive fault identification framework is proposed, which uses the TabNet deep learning architecture with hyperparameters optimized by Optuna. Firstly, a 10 kV simulation model is developed in Simulink to generate a diverse fault dataset. For each simulated fault, voltage and current signals from eight channels (L1–L4 voltage and current) are collected. Secondly, multi-domain features are extracted from each channel across time, frequency, waveform, and wavelet perspectives. Then, an attention-based fusion mechanism is employed to capture cross-channel dependencies, followed by L2-norm-based feature selection to enhance generalization. Finally, the optimized TabNet model effectively classifies 24 fault categories, achieving an accuracy of 97.33%, and outperforms baseline methods including Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), Convolutional Neural Network-Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM), Capsule Network with Sparse Filtering (CNSF), and Dual-Branch CNN in terms of accuracy, macro-F1 score, and kappa coefficient. It also exhibits strong stability and fast convergence during training. These results demonstrate the robustness and interpretability of the proposed method for SPG fault detection.