Prediction of departure flight delays through the use of predictive tools based on machine learning/deep learning algorithms

Abstract

The objective of this research is to predict the delays in the departure of scheduled commercial flights through a methodology that uses predictive tools based on machine learning/deep learning (ML/DL), with supervised training in regression, based on the available flight datasets. Since the novel contribution of this work is, first, to make the comparison of the predictions in terms of means and statistical variance of the different ML/DL models implemented and, second, to determine the coefficients of the importance of the features or flight attributes, using ML methods known as permutation importance, it is possible to rank the importance of flight attributes by their influence in determining the delay time and reduce the problem of selecting the most important flight attributes. From the results obtained, it is worth mentioning that the model that presents the best performance is the ensemble or combinatorial method of random forest regressor models, with an acceptable prediction range (measured with the root-mean-square-error).