Cables are more and more widely used in distribution networks due to their high reliability and not easily affected by weather． However，with the increase of service life of the cable，the cable will fail due to partial discharge and other effects． Incipient cable fault is a precursor to permanent faults． It is an important way to improve grid security for identifying and locating incipient cable fault． Because the overcurrent disturbance signal contains rich transient information in the time － frequency domain，a method of locating incipient cable fault section is proposed using traveling wave feature and stacked automatic encoder ( SAE) together． Firstly，the current signal is processed by S － transform，and the features are extracted，which are used as the input of stack automatic encoder． The well － trained network can correctly locate the incipient cable fault section． The simulation data is obtained by constructing the simulation model in PSCAD/EMTDC． The results show that the proposed method has higher accuracy and better generalization performance．