Early warning of impending instability in a power system under disturbance conditions is important for preventing of system collapse. A measurement-based approach is proposed to assess the potential power system transient instability problem under cascading outages. Where a measurement-based index is obtained as the estimation accuracy of a linear autoregressive exogenous (ARX) model to estimate the dynamic response of the power system and indicate the system stability to some extent after a disturbance. The proposed approach was verified using a set of marginally stable cases in a 179-bus WECC equivalent power system. Then the instability early warning threshold for this system is obtained as 0.44.