Line failure cascading in power networks is a complex process that involves direct and
indirect interactions between lines' states. We consider the inverse problem of learning
statistical models to find the sparse interaction graph from the pairwise statistics collected
from line failures data in the steady states and over time. We show that the weighted l 1-
regularized pairwise maximum entropy models successfully capture pairwise and indirect
higher-order interactions undistinguished by observing the pairwise statistics. The learned …