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Electricity theft behaviors have caused great harm to the economic benefits of power companies and the secure operation of power systems, thus electricity theft detection is paid much attention in the actual power supply management. In this work, a two-step electricity theft detection strategy is proposed to identify electricity theft users and predict potentially stolen electricity (PSE) for maximizing economic return. In the first step, a neural network model called convolutional autoencoder (CAE) is proposed for electricity theft identification, and the convolutional layer is adopted in CAE to extract and identify the abnormalities of electricity theft users against the uniformity and periodicity of normal power consumption features. In the second step, the PSE of each identified electricity theft user is predicted by the improved regression algorithm named Tr-XGBoost, which combines the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) algorithm and transfer adaptive boosting (TrAdaBoost) training strategy. The propsoed Tr-XGBoost could learn the relationship between the extracted electricity features and the PSE of each electricity theft user, and then the predicted PSE can be used to determine the list of electricity theft users to be inspected for maximizing economic return. Case studies on both the IEEE 33-bus test system and a low-voltage distribution system of a province in China show that the proposed two-step electricity theft detection strategy can improve the accuracy of electricity theft identification, and obtain a larger economic return because of a more accurate result of PSE prediction than other state-of-the-art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]