Flight Delay Prediction

Our objective is to predict arrival delays of commercial flights. According to the US Department of Transportation, about 21% of commercial flights scheduled between June 2003 and October 2021 have experienced some form of delay. It is critical for airlines to estimate flight delays as accurately as possible in order to improve customer satisfaction and optimize the income of airline agencies. This project will be evaluated on the basis of arrival delay prediction accuracy for flights

Contributors

• Jordan Silke
• Jonas Bacareza

Understanding the problem

In an effort to understand some common causes of commercial flight delays, a number of sources were consulted including government agencies and flight-focused blog posts. A brief overview of findings can be found in the Research directory. These common causes will inform feature selection and engineering decisions.

Data description

Data was sourced from a LHL PostgreSQL database and descriptions were provided for each table. We used a custom script to extract the feature names from these description files and the raw data can be found here. The rationale behind missing value processing can be reviewed and reproduced by reading and executing the data_overview notebook. The data from the flights table included in this repository is a randomly sampled subset of the source table.

Recommended exploration

🔳 - To do.
✅ - Core task 'complete' (at least a first pass).
🧰 - Work in progress.

Exploration task results can be found here