Prediction of Flight Arrival Delay Time Using U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics

Jiarui Li, Ran Ji, Cheng'ao Li, Xiaoying Yang, Jiayi Li, Yiran Li, Xihan Xiong, Yutong Fang, Shusheng Ding, Tianxiang Cui

Abstract: According to the data from the Bureau of Trans-portation Statistics (BTS), the number of passengers and flights has been increasing year by year. However, flight delay has become a pervasive problem in the United States in recent years due to various factors, including human factors such as security regulations, as well as natural factors such as bad weather. Flight delay not only affects the profits of airlines but also affects the satisfaction of passengers. Therefore, a model that can predict the arrival time of airplanes needs to be developed. Machine learning methods have been widely applied to prediction problems. In this paper, a variety of machine learning and computational intelligence methods, including linear regression, decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), gradient boosting (GB), gaussian regression models and genetic programming were trained on the U.S. Department of Transportation's (DOT) BTS dataset. The results show that genetic programming performs best and can be used to predict the arrival time of the U.S. flights in advance, which is beneficial for airlines and passengers to make timely decisions.