Generalized Flight Delay Prediction Method Using Gradient Boosting Decision Tree

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Accurate flight delay prediction contains great reference value for airline business and passenger travel. Recent studies have been concentrated on applying machine learning methods to predict the probability of flight delay. Most of the previous prediction methods are built for a single air route or airport. This paper explores a broader spectrum of factors that may potentially affect the flight delay and proposes a gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) based models for generalized flight delay prediction. To build a dataset for the proposed model, automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) messages are received, pre-processed, and integrated with other information such as weather condition of airport, flight schedule, and airport information. Since the delay prediction results can be given with higher resolution, the designed prediction tasks contain four different classification tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed GBDT-based model can obtain higher prediction accuracy (87.72% for the binary classification) when handling our limited dataset.