Intentional islanding of power grids with data depth

A new method for intentional islanding of power grids is proposed, based on a data-driven and inherently geometric concept of data depth. The utility of the new depth-based islanding is illustrated in application to the Italian power grid. It is found that spectral clustering with data depths outperforms spectral clustering with k-means in terms of k-way expansion. Directions on how the k-depths can be extended to multilayer grids in a tensor representation are outlined.