Supervised learning approaches to flight delay prediction

Delays in flights and other airline operations have significant consequences in quality of service, operational costs, and customer satisfaction. Therefore, it is important to predict the occurrence of delays and take necessary actions accordingly. In this study, we addressed the flight delay prediction problem from a supervised machine learning perspective. Using a realworld airline operations dataset provided by a leading airline company, we identified optimum dataset features for optimum prediction accuracy. In addition, we trained and tested 11 machine learning models on the datasets that we created from the original dataset via feature selection and transformation. CART and KNN showed consistently good performance in almost all cases achieving 0.816 and 0.807 F-Scores respectively. Similarly, GBM, XGB, and LGBM showed very good performance in most of the cases, achieving F-Scores around 0.810. Keywords: air transportation, flight delay prediction, machine learning, data science Mehmet Cemal ATLIOĞLU1 , Mustafa BOLAT1 , Murat ŞAHİN2 , Volkan TUNALI*3 , Deniz KILINÇ 1 Tav Technology, İstanbul, E-Mail: [email protected] E-Mail: [email protected] ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1289-2715 ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8169-0629 2 Manisa Celal Bayar University, Faculty of Technology, E-Mail: [email protected] ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2866-8796 * Corresponding Author: [email protected] 3 Maltepe University, Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2735-7996 4İzmir Bakırçay University, Faculty of Engineering and Architecture

Supervised Learning Approaches to Flight Delay Prediction

Delays in flights and other airline operations have significant consequences in quality of service, operational costs, and customer satisfaction. Therefore, it is important to predict the occurrence of delays and take necessary actions accordingly. In this study, we addressed the flight delay prediction problem from a supervised machine learning perspective. Using a realworld airline operations dataset provided by a leading airline company, we identified optimum dataset features for optimum prediction accuracy. In addition, we trained and tested 11 machine learning models on the datasets that we created from the original dataset via feature selection and transformation. CART and KNN showed consistently good performance in almost all cases achieving 0.816 and 0.807 F-Scores respectively. Similarly, GBM, XGB, and LGBM showed very good performance in most of the cases, achieving F-Scores around 0.810. Keywords: air transportation, flight delay prediction, machine learning, data science Mehmet Cemal ATLIOĞLU1 , Mustafa BOLAT1 , Murat ŞAHİN2 , Volkan TUNALI*3 , Deniz KILINÇ 1 Tav Technology, İstanbul, E-Mail: [email protected] E-Mail: [email protected] ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1289-2715 ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8169-0629 2 Manisa Celal Bayar University, Faculty of Technology, E-Mail: [email protected] ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2866-8796 * Corresponding Author: [email protected] 3 Maltepe University, Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2735-7996 4İzmir Bakırçay University, Faculty of Engineering and Architecture