arXiv:2610.40728v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medium-voltage feeders have few real-time measurements, so distribution system state estimation (DSSE) rests on pseudo-measurements of the secondary substations, a prior in Bayesian terms. Weighted least squares keeps the power flow exact but reduces this prior to a mean and variance, while supervised deep learning estimators also learn the power flow and are tied to one measurement set. We propose PoSE (posterior sampling for state estimation), which keeps the Bayesian structure of DSSE and learns only what the distribution system operator does not know, namely the distribution of substation injections, modelled by a neural network trained with flow matching on historical data. The power flow equations, grid topology and measurements enter only at sampling, through a noise-aware Kalman-type correction. The neural network therefore never approximates the power flow, but every posterior sample is a physically consistent operating point, and one trained prior serves any measurement set, noise level and topology. On the IEEE 33-bus feeder, PoSE lowers the probabilistic injection error (CRPS) by 6.7-7.5% against a full-covariance Gaussian prior in all 12 tested settings. It provides reliable uncertainty: the 90% intervals contain the true injection almost exactly as often as exact posterior samples would, whereas those of supervised estimators contain it in only 37-78% of cases. On the 240-bus unbalanced three-phase Iowa feeder, it gives the lowest injection, voltage and branch-current errors of all estimators. A fast variant matches this accuracy at 0.2-0.6s per snapshot and, without retraining, beats Gaussian priors and retrained supervised estimators on seven reconfigured topologies.
Bayesian Distribution System State Estimation with Flow Matching
A flow-matching neural network that learns only the distribution of substation injections, called PoSE (posterior sampling for state estimation), cut the probabilistic injection error (CRPS) by 6.7-7.5% against a full-covariance Gaussian prior across all 12 tested settings on the IEEE 33-bus feeder, according to an arXiv paper (2610.40728v1). PoSE keeps the Bayesian structure of distribution system state estimation and applies the power flow equations, grid topology and measurements only at sampling through a noise-aware Kalman-type correction, so the network never approximates the power flow and one trained prior serves any measurement set, noise level and topology. The authors report PoSE's 90% intervals contain the true injection almost exactly as often as exact posterior samples would, versus 37-78% for supervised estimators, and that on the 240-bus unbalanced three-phase Iowa feeder it gives the lowest injection, voltage and branch-current errors of all estimators, with a fast variant matching that accuracy at 0.2-0.6s per snapshot and beating Gaussian priors and retrained supervised estimators on seven reconfigured topologies without retraining.
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