Queue up for takeoff: a transferable deep learning framework for flight delay prediction
This addresses flight delays for the aviation industry to reduce disruptions and improve passenger experience, with incremental improvements in transferability.
The paper tackled flight delay prediction by introducing a Queue-Theory SimAM model, which achieved an accuracy of 0.927 and F1 score of 0.932 on US data and 0.826 accuracy and 0.791 F1 score on European data.
Flight delays are a significant challenge in the aviation industry, causing major financial and operational disruptions. To improve passenger experience and reduce revenue loss, flight delay prediction models must be both precise and generalizable across different networks. This paper introduces a novel approach that combines Queue-Theory with a simple attention model, referred to as the Queue-Theory SimAM (QT-SimAM). To validate our model, we used data from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, where our proposed QT-SimAM (Bidirectional) model outperformed existing methods with an accuracy of 0.927 and an F1 score of 0.932. To assess transferability, we tested the model on the EUROCONTROL dataset. The results demonstrated strong performance, achieving an accuracy of 0.826 and an F1 score of 0.791. Ultimately, this paper outlines an effective, end-to-end methodology for predicting flight delays. The proposed model's ability to forecast delays with high accuracy across different networks can help reduce passenger anxiety and improve operational decision-making