Applying Machine Learning to Aviation Big Data for Flight Delay Prediction

Flight delay has been a serious and widespread problem that needs to be solved. One promising solution is the flight delay prediction. Although big data analytics and machine learning have been applied successfully in many domains, their applications in aviation are limited. This paper presents a comprehensive study of flight delay spanning data pre-processing, data visualization and data mining, in which we develop several machine learning models to predict flight arrival delays. Two data sets were used, namely Airline On-Time Performance (AOTP) Data and Quality Controlled Local Climatological Data (QCLCD). This paper aims to recognize useful patterns of the flight delay from aviation data and perform accurate delay prediction. The best result for flight delay prediction (five classes) using machine learning models is 89.07% (Multilayer Perceptron). A Convolution neural network model is also built which is enlightened by the idea of pattern recognition and success of neural network method, showing a slightly better result with 89.32% prediction accuracy.