A Hybrid Two-Stage Machine Learning Pipeline for Fault Detection and Classification in Power Transmission Systems

Rapid and accurate fault detection in high-voltage transmission networks is essential for grid reliability and equipment protection. Transmission fault datasets are frequently imbalanced, and certain fault types produce electrical signatures that fall within the normal operating envelope, causing single-model classifiers to fail on safety-critical cases. This paper proposes a hybrid two-stage machine learning pipeline that decouples detection from classification. Stage 1 combines an Isolation Forest anomaly detector with an optional supervised binary detector through an OR-fusion rule; the supervised branch is allocated automatically during training for any fault class the anomaly detector cannot resolve, and is omitted when no such class exists. Stage 2 applies a Random Forest multiclass classifier only to samples flagged by Stage 1. Feature engineering is expressed as a per-measurement-point operator mapping six raw channels to eighteen features, including zero-sequence symmetrical components derived from Fortescue's theorem, yielding 18L features for L measurement points. On the TLFaultDataset, the pipeline raises Line-fault end-to-end accuracy from 31.3% to 95.8%. On an independent single-point dataset, the same framework attains 97.25% end-to-end accuracy across all classes including normal operation, exceeding the TLFed federated benchmark of 94.84% without GPU or federated infrastructure, at 0.05 ms per sample on CPU. Ablation on both datasets shows zero-sequence features resolving the three-phase versus three-phase-to-ground ambiguity, raising the F1-score of that class pair from 0.39 to 0.997. The direction of the zero-sequence signature is found to be system-dependent, motivating a learned decision boundary in place of a fixed relay threshold.