Flight Price Prediction Using Machine Learning and Deep Learning: A Comparative Study

Airfare pricing is a highly dynamic and complex phenomenon influenced by numerous variables including departure time, number of stops, days to departure, flight class, and seasonal demand patterns. Accurate fare prediction offers practical value for cost-sensitive travelers and revenue-management optimization by airlines. This work presents a systematic comparative evaluation of eleven regression algorithms, spanning classical machine learning and contemporary deep learning approaches. Classical models include Linear Regression, Ridge, Lasso, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Extra Trees, Bagging, K-Nearest Neighbors, Gradient Boosting, and XGBoost. Five deep tabular architectures are benchmarked: MLP, DeepResNet1D, AttentionNet, WideAndDeep, and TabTransformer. Six CNN backbones (VGG11, VGG13, ResNet18, ResNet34, MobileNetV2, MobileNetV3) are also evaluated using synthetic 2-D image representations. All models are assessed across seven metrics: MAE, MSE, RMSE, R², Adjusted R², RMSLE, and MAPE. Results show that TabTransformer and ExtraTreesRegressor achieve R² exceeding 0.99.