Flight delay is the most common preoccupation of aviation stakeholders around the world. Airlines, which suffer from a monetary and customer loyalty loss, are the most affected. Various studies have attempted to analyze and solve flight delays using machine learning algorithms. This research aims to predict flights’ arrival delay using Artificial Neural Network (ANN). We applied a MultiLayer Perceptron (MLP) to train and test our data. Two approaches have been adopted in our work. In the first one, we used historical flight data extracted from Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS). The second approach improves the efficiency of the model by applying selective-data training. It consists of selecting only most relevant instances from the training dataset which are delayed flights. According to BTS, a flight whose difference between scheduled and actual arrival times is 15 minutes or greater is considered delayed. Departure delays and flight distance proved to be very contributive to flight delays. An adjusted and optimized hyperparameters using grid search technique helped us choose the right architecture of the network and have a better accuracy and less error than the existing literature. The results of both traditional and selective training were compared. The efficiency and time complexity of the second method are compared against those of the traditional training procedure. The neural network MLP was able to predict flight arrival delay with a coefficient of determination R 2 of 0.9048, and the selective procedure achieved a time saving and a better R 2 score of 0.9560. To enhance the reliability of the proposed method, the performance of the MLP was compared with that of Gradient Boosting (GB) and Decision Trees (DT). The result is that the MLP outperformed all existing benchmark methods.
The excessive growth of air traffic, with the limited airspace and airports capacity, results in a flight demand-capacity imbalance leading to air traffic delays. This paper explores the factors associated with delay in both microscopic and macroscopic ways. The aim is to develop a model which analyzes and predicts the occurrence of flight arrival delays using US domestic flight data for the year 2018. It will provide passengers, airlines and airport managers with reliable flight arrival schedules, and consequently reduce economic losses and enhance passengers trust. Beside database features, the proposed model is to the best of our knowledge the first attempt to predict flight arrival delays using three new features which are contributive factors to delays: Departure Time and Arrival Time of the day in which the flight was performed (Early morning, late morning, noon, afternoon, evening or night) and model of aircraft. Four Machine Learning classifiers namely Random Forest, Decision Trees, K-Nearest Neighbors and Naive Bayes were used. In order to find the best parameters of each algorithm, we implemented Grid Search technique. The performance of each classifier was compared in terms of hyperparameters tuning, classification metrics and features description. The experimental results showed that the proposed system was able to predict flight arrival delays with the best Random Forest accuracy of 0.9356 and a higher number of correctly classified flights. To prove the importance of our findings, we compared our model to that of existing literature studies.
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