A Review on Flight Delay Prediction

Alice Sternberg, Jorge Soares,

Diego Carvalho, Eduardo Ogasawara ∗
CEFET/RJ
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
arXiv:1703.06118v2 [cs.CY] 3 Nov 2017

November 6, 2017

Abstract
Flight delays hurt airlines, airports, and passengers. Their prediction is crucial during
the decision-making process for all players of commercial aviation. Moreover, the develop-
ment of accurate prediction models for flight delays became cumbersome due to the com-
plexity of air transportation system, the number of methods for prediction, and the deluge
of flight data. In this context, this paper presents a thorough literature review of approaches
used to build flight delay prediction models from the Data Science perspective. We pro-
pose a taxonomy and summarize the initiatives used to address the flight delay prediction
problem, according to scope, data, and computational methods, giving particular attention
to an increased usage of machine learning methods. Besides, we also present a timeline
of significant works that depicts relationships between flight delay prediction problems and
research trends to address them.

1 Introduction
Delay is one of the most remembered performance indicators of any transportation system.
Notably, commercial aviation players understand delay as the period by which a flight is late
or postponed. Thus, a delay may be represented by the difference between scheduled and real
times of departure or arrival of a plane (117) . Country regulator authorities have a multitude
of indicators related to tolerance thresholds for flight delays. Indeed, flight delay is an essen-
tial subject in the context of air transportation systems. In 2013, 36% of flights delayed by
more than five minutes in Europe, 31.1% of flights delayed by more than 15 minutes in the
United States, and 16.3% of flights were canceled or suffered delays greater than 30 minutes in
Brazil (5,45) . This indicates how relevant this indicator is and how it affects no matter the scale
of airline meshes.
Flight delays have negative impacts, mainly economic, for passengers, airlines, and air-
ports. Given the uncertainty of their occurrence, passengers usually plan to travel many hours
earlier for their appointments, increasing their trip costs, to ensure their arrival on time (10,53) .
On the other hand, airlines suffer penalties, fines and additional operation costs, such as crew
and aircrafts retentions in airports (25,51,62,112) . Furthermore, from the sustainability point of
view, delays may also cause environmental damage by increasing fuel consumption and gas
emissions (8,75,95,102,105,125) .
Delays also jeopardize airlines marketing strategies, since carriers rely on customers’ loy-
alty to support their frequent-flyer programs and the consumer’s choice is also affected by
reliable performance. There is a identified relationship between levels of delays and fares,
∗ Corresponding author: [email protected]

1
aircraft sizes, flight frequency and complaints about airline service (21,39,83,93,133) . The estima-
tion of flight delays can improve the tactical and operational decisions of airports and airlines
managers and warn passengers so that they can rearrange their plans (40) .
To better understand the entire flight ecosystems, vast volumes of data from commercial
aviation are collected every moment and stored in databases. Submerged in this massive amount
of data produced by sensors and IoT (29,86,90) , analysts and data scientists are intensifying their
computational and data management skills to extract useful information from each datum. In
this context, the procedure of comprehending the domain, managing data and applying a model
is known as Data Science, a trend in solving challenging problems related to Big Data.
Under this data deluge scenario, this paper contributes by presenting an analysis of the
available literature on flight delay prediction from Data Science perspective. It seeks to sum-
marize the most researched trends in this field, describing how this problem is addressed and
comparing methods that have been used to build prediction models. This becomes more rele-
vant as we observe an increasing presence of machine learning methods to model flight delays
predictions. This analysis is conducted by establishing a flight delay research taxonomy, which
organizes approaches according to the type of problem, scope, data issues, and computational
methods. The paper also contributes by presenting a timeline of major works grouped by the
kind of flight delay prediction problem.
Besides this introduction, the rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces
the flight delay scenario, describing a typical operation of a commercial flight, kinds of delays
and their impacts. It also structures three different ways for treating the prediction problem.
In Section 3, a taxonomic analysis of the prediction is presented, showing the most researched
topics, the scope of application, data and methods that authors are using to predict flight delays.
Section 4 discusses the main results based on a timeline of publications grouped by the types of
problems and their intersections. Finally, Section 5 concludes our analysis by presenting major
highlights and trends about delay prediction problem.

2 The flight delay scenario

Commercial aviation is a complex distributed transportation system. It deals with valuable
resources, demand fluctuations, and a sophisticated origin-destination matrix that need orches-
tration to provide smooth and safety operations. Furthermore, individual passenger follows her
itineraries while airlines plan various schedules for aircrafts, pilots and flight attendants. Figure
1 illustrates a typical operation of a commercial flight. Stages can take place at terminal bound-
aries, airports, runways, and airspace, being susceptible to different kinds of delays. Some
examples include mechanical problems, weather conditions, ground delays, air traffic control,
runway queues and capacity constraints (3,63,103) .
This scheme is repeated several times throughout the day for each flight in the system.
Pilots, flight attendants and aircrafts may have different schedules due to legal rests, duties, and
maintenance plans for airplanes. So, any disruption in the system can impact the subsequent
flights of the same airline (2) . Moreover, disturbances may cause congestion at airspace or other
airports, creating queues and delaying some flights from other carriers (106,123) . In this way, the
prediction of flight delays is an essential subject for airlines, airports, Air Navigation Service
Providers (ANSP), and network managers, like FAA (52) and Eurocontrol (46) .
The flight delay prediction problem can be treated by different points of view: (i) delay
propagation, (ii) root delay and cancellation. In delay propagation, one study how delay propa-
gates through the network of the transportation system. On the other hand, considering that new
problems may happen eventually, it is also important to predict further delays and understand
their causes. Such occurrences, in this paper, are named as a root delay problem. Finally, under
specific situations, delays can lead to cancellations, forcing airlines and passengers to resched-
ule their itineraries. So, researchers focused on cancellation analysis try to figure out which
conditions lead to cancellations. Moreover, it explores the airlines’ decision-making process

2
 Resources Resources
(aircraft, pilots, (aircraft, pilots,
flight flight
attendants,...) attendants,...)

Supplies Supplies
(food, Boarding Gate Wheels En route Wheels Gate Disembark (food,
beverages, procedures out off flight on in procedures beverages,
fuel, ...) fuel, ...)

Taxi out Flight time Taxi in

Ground Ground
activities activities
(aircraft check, (aircraft check,
cleaning, ...) cleaning, ...)

Figure 1: A typical operation of a commercial flight

for choosing the flights to be canceled.

3 Taxonomy
The main problems related to flight delay prediction are identified and organized in a taxonomy.
It includes scopes, models, and ways of handling flight delay prediction problem. It considers
flight domain features, such as problem and scope, and Data Science perspectives, such as
data and methods. Figure 2 depicts the entire taxonomy while next subsections describe each
component of the taxonomy and related work.
Regarding the available literature on flight delay prediction, we have conducted a systematic
mapping study. The search expression string (“airport delay” ∨ “flight delay”) ∧ (“predict”
∨ “forecast” ∨ “propagate”) was used to query Scopus on October 2017. Query result brought
310 references. Additionally, 29 works were added using snowballing search.

Figure 2: Taxonomy of the flight delay prediction problem

We have selected 134 to build this review due to their relevance and direct link with the
flight delay prediction problem. The main criteria to be included is to have the word “delay”
in the abstract, and the paper should have at least the one citation at Google Scholar per year
before 2016. It means that to include a paper of 2015, it must have at least one citation, and so
one.

3
 From this study, we were able to present a taxonomy that drives the organization of the
following sections.

3.1 Problem
Problem is the core feature in domain taxonomy. As seen in Section 2, there are three ma-
jor concerns regarding the flight delay prediction problem: delay propagation, root delay and
cancellation. Depending on the emphasis of the research, authors select one of these lines to
develop their models.

3.1.1 Root delay and cancellation

Considering that new delay (root delay) may happen eventually, these root delays impair the
performance of transportation network. Researchers create prediction models to tackle root
delay, predicting when and where a delay will occur and what are its reasons and sources. This
includes models that efficiently seek to estimate the number of minutes, probability or level of
delay for a specific flight, airline or airport.
A relevant number of works focused on predicting and estimating delay duration (102) . Some
approaches considered probabilistic models and innovation distribution (90,112) , whereas others
find conditions for the occurrence of a root delay, such as passenger demand, fares, flight
frequency, aircraft size, and taxi-out time (10,131) .
Particular circumstances, such as weather conditions, acts of God, aircraft problems, may
lead airlines to cancel flights. Besides, airlines may directly cancel a flight, when factors like
seat occupancy or cost savings are taking into consideration (80,122) .

3.1.2 Delay propagation

In delay propagation, the primary objective is to understand how delay propagates through
airlines and airports based on the assumption that an initial delay has already occurred in the
transportation system. A particular scenario happens when delays are spread to other flights of
the same airline as chain reactions (2,16,24,118) . Under this situations, it is important to measure
how stable and reliable carriers can be to recover from delay propagation (44,119) . Also, a delay
may continue to propagate due to the scheduling of critical resources or retentions in other
airports (59) .
When scheduled time for take-off or landing is not fulfilled, flights need new slots that
may be unavailable. In this scenario, it is important to understand the effects that a root delay
in flight may produce to both departure and arrival airports (61,99,123) . Such phenomenon may
increase the number of flights at some period, generating capacity problems and queues.

3.2 Scope
Delays can be induced by different sources and affect airports, airlines, en route airspace or an
ensemble of them. For analysis purposes, one may assume a simplified system where only one
of these actors or any combination of them is considered. It should be noted that any scope of
application can be combined with any problem mentioned in Section 3.1.
Some work focused on airports to predict delays for all departs considered all airlines and
en route airspace indifferently (102,106) . Airports are also the focus when the objective is to inves-
tigate their efficiency based on delays of all carriers (71,72,94,99) . On the other hand, only airlines
are considered when comparing the performance of two airlines under the same conditions (3) .
An ensemble of airport and en route airspace were studied to understand the relationship
between congestion and delays (63,88) . Others considered airports and airlines as well to evaluate
capacity problems and airlines decisions (112) . There are many possibilities to ensemble scopes.
This becomes important when studying the dynamics of air transportation systems, mainly
when targeting root delay.

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3.3 Data
Three fundamental questions about data are: Where to find flight data? Which attributes should
be considered? Is it possible to handle each datum to obtain better results? To answer these
questions, the data problem is divided into three classes: (i) data sources, (ii) dimensions, and
(iii) data management.

3.3.1 Data Sources

The type of datasets from the air transportation system are mainly related to airlines, airports
or ensemble. Since airlines and airports commonly do not share their databases with the entire
community, they are often used by collaborators of those institutions. Ensemble datasets may
include both carriers, airports, and additional information provided by governmental agencies,
regulatory authorities, and service providers. Table 1 displays the type of datasets by regions.
It presents the number of publications and the top three most cited papers in each category.
Governmental agencies usually provide public access to their databases with different granu-
larity. It is noticed that data from The United States Department of Transportation (43) , primarily
through The Federal Aviation Administration (52) and The Bureau of Transportation Statistics
databases (26) are widely used to obtain information about flights. The Eurocontrol (46) database
is provided by an intergovernmental organization in Europe. This dataset is also used inten-
sively in flight delay studies (103) .

Table 1: Number of sources of real data about the air transportation system per region
Region Ensemble Airline Airport
Asia 2 (89,111) 1 (104) 1 (121)
Brazil 2 (5,110) 0 0
Europe 7 (29,30,81) 2 (58,109) 7 (27,96,103)
US 11 (90,112,128) 7 (3,4,78) 16 (10,54,55)

Other related datasets, such as weather, may be obtained from governmental databases or
service providers. This includes, for example, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin-
istration of the United States (92) . In fact, authors may use more than one source to develop their
models. Datasets from United States Department of Transportation (43) , National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (92) , and Weather Company (113) are commonly used to build delay
prediction models.
Additionally, some researchers (130,131) create synthetic datasets to evaluate their models
instead of using real data. For example, Zou et al. (131) developed a market scenario, considering
airport capacity, links, frequency, and characteristics of flights and passenger demand.

3.3.2 Dimensions
Considering the main public datasets and the papers analyzed, we have organized them main
commonly attributes used into seven classes depicted in the data model of Figure 3. They
abstract the main input attributes for delay prediction models. Beyond scheduled and actual
times of departure and arrival, several characteristics may be considered depending on the
focus of research.
Spatial dimension is related to the positions taken by the aircraft, such as departure and
arrival airports, their cities, regions, and countries (61,102) . The temporal dimension is often used
to capture seasonality or periodic patterns of data. These elements contain both date (season,
month, and day of the week) and time (the day or time of the day) characteristics (1,90,112) .
Weather dimension expresses external and environmental conditions in a particular moment (50) .
It may represent specific features, such as ceiling and visibility (103) that defines, for example, if

5
 Figure 3: Data model of the flight delay prediction

take-off or landing is going to happen under visual or instrumental conditions. Additionally, en

route airspace weather situation (known as convective weather) and airport weather situation
(known as surface weather) contain several momentaneous parameters (63) .
Planning describes what airlines, airports, and air traffic controllers intend to do with critical
resources involved in their operations. This dimension includes (i) airline schedules, (ii) airport
schedules and (iii) flight plans. Arline schedules define all origin and destination points, their
frequency and sequence, and aircrafts and crew allocations for each flight (3,16,24,44,119) . Airport
schedules indicate the time each flight takes-off and lands, while flight plans indicate all en
route parameters, such as distance, route, speed, and high (59) .
Features represent characteristics of airlines, airports or aircrafts. Airlines status may indi-
cate if a carrier is a major or an affiliate one or if it is a traditional hub-and-spoke or a low-cost
point-to-point. Aircrafts characteristics show their size, their number of seats and occupancy,
which may be a constraint to some operations because they affect market decisions. Finally,
airport infrastructure may represent the number of runways, gates and service providers in an
airport facility (94,109,122) .
The state of the system indicates in which conditions airlines, airports or en route airspace
are operating at a specific moment. Some examples correspond to prior levels of delay or
airports closures (130) . The information about the state of the system is used to predict its be-
havior. Finally, operations are related to capacity and demand of airports and en route airspace.
When demand exceeds capacity, a congestion scenario is formed, which enables occurrence of
delays (88) .

3.3.3 Data Management

Since the use of databases to store a massive amount of data have been increasing over the last
years, data management techniques are becoming more and more crucial to provide a conve-
nient and efficient query processing. Data management tasks contemplate design of database
structure to enable data integration from different sources, elimination of inconsistencies, and
data transformation. The development of a data warehouse supported by online analytical pro-
cessing (OLAP) and data management techniques may be useful for this purpose. As mentioned

6
in Section 3.3.1, multiple sources of data may be used. Thus, the usage of data warehouses
combined with Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) procedures are commonly used to link the
datasets of different sources (126) .
There are many data management preprocessing procedures that can be applied to flight
delay prediction datasets. They include data cleaning, feature selection, data transformation,
and clustering. One of the main tasks of data cleaning is outlier removal. Extreme conditions
may result in outliers that are not interesting if one is concerned about regular operations (112) .
Feature selection is the process of identifying attributes that are less correlated. Correlated and
irrelevant attributes may provide model over-fitting or decrease prediction performance (118) .
These preprocessing procedures are essential since the better the preprocessing is conducted on
input data, the better the prediction models may be developed from it.
Data transformation is also an important activity to empower prediction models. Some
examples of transformations include normalization and discretization. Normalization reduces
the range of possible values to a particular interval, such as -1 to 1 or 0 to 1. It gives equal
strength for different variables and let machine learning methods identify which are the most
relevant ones. Discretization consists of replacing numerical values by representative labels.
It includes the transform of time periods into bins of a fixed time (10,72) , binning of values to
cope with limitations in computational packages (24,123) or to better train prediction models (16) ,
especially when using machine learning models.
Clustering means grouping elements of the dataset in a way that similar observations stay
together in the same group and dissimilar items stay in different groups. Many works compute
clustering techniques, such as k-means or agglomerative hierarchical clustering, to support
preliminary steps for further prediction models (102) .

3.4 Method
The flight delay prediction problem may be modeled in many ways, depending on the objectives
of the research. Methods were divided into five groups, according to Figure 4. The numbers
next to each category represent the number of related papers.

Figure 4: Categories of methods used to model the flight delay prediction

3.4.1 Statistical Analysis

Statistical analysis usually encompasses the use of regression models, correlation analysis,
econometric models, parametric tests, non-parametric tests, and multivariate analysis (MVA).
When it comes to regression models, both delay multiplier and recursive models can help air-
lines to understand delay propagation effects through the network and to estimate the costs of
delays (16,84,115,124,127) .
Many econometric models are also build to evaluate the efficiency flight systems, such as
the analysis of the investments done by a governmental agency (88) or to evaluate the equilibrium

7
point considering the relationship between delays and passenger demand, fares, frequency and
size of the aircrafts (131) . Xiong et al. (122) built an econometric model based on pre-existing
delays, potential delay savings, distance, characteristics of the destination airport and airline,
frequency, aircraft size, occupancy rate and fare to understand which reasons lead airlines to
cancel their flights. Qin et al. (101) studied the periodicity of flight delay rate, whereas Mofokeng
et al. (87) studied the impact of aircraft turnaround time during maintenance check. Finally, Hao
et al. (61) built a model to quantify how delays originated at New York are propagated to other
airports.
Some works focus on statistical inference. Pathomsiri et al. (94) used a non-parametric func-
tion to evaluate the efficiency of airports of the United States regarding delays. Reynolds et
al. (103) computed the correlation between levels of delays and capacities of the European air-
ports. They also suggested different approaches to deal with the congestion problem, describing
their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, Abdel-Aty et al. (1) calculated daily average of de-
lays to detect correlations to understand the principal causes of delays at Orlando International
Airport.

3.4.2 Probabilistic Models

Probabilistic Models encompass analysis tools that estimate the probability of an event based on
historical data. Tu et al. (112) developed a probabilistic model based on expectation-maximization
combined with genetic algorithms to predict the distribution of departure delay at Denver In-
ternational Airport.
Boswell et al. (24) expressed delay classes by a probabilistic mass function and used a transi-
tion matrix to verify delay propagation to subsequent flights. They made a cancellation analysis
computing the conditional probability to cancel a flight given that its previous flight was de-
layed. Mueller et al. (90) modeled departure, en route and arrival delays using density functions.
The authors verified that Normal distribution fitted better to departure delays, while en route
and arrival delays were better described by Poisson distribution. Concerned about the total
duration of a root delay, Wong et al. (118) studied delay propagation through a survival model.
Evans et al. (49) built a theoretical routing networks that integrated flight routing and schedul-
ing model. Kotegawa et al. (74) built a series of algorithms that forecast restructuring of the US
commercial airline network to reduce both flight delay and total delay. Pfeil et al. (98) a proba-
bilistic forecasts of whether or not a terminal area route will be blocked based on raw convec-
tive weather forecasts. Finally, Zhong et al. (129) build a Monte Carlo simulations to estimate
airports’ runway capacity.

3.4.3 Network Representation

Network representation encompasses the study of flight systems according to a graph theory.
Abdelghany et al. (2) built direct acyclic graphs to model the schedule of an airline (including
flight times and resources availability) to detect disruptions and their impacts on the rest of the
network. They used the classical shortest path algorithm to evaluate propagation effects.
Ahmadbeygi et al. (3) built propagation trees to compare two different airlines, one operating
in a conventional hub-and-spoke scheme and the other in a low-cost point-to-point system. Xu
et al. (123) and Wu et al. (120) built a Bayesian network to model delay propagation. Baspinar (14)
built a network-epidemic process using historical flight-track data of Europe to create a novel
delay propagation model.

3.4.4 Operational Research

Operational Research includes advanced analytical methods (such as optimization, simula-
tions, and queue theory) to help key-players make better decisions. Simulations may analyze
airport capacity data, considering departure and arrival delays under different weather condi-
tions (63,106) . They may also evaluate the cost of, each delayed flight of an airline schedule (109) .

8
Moreover, simulations through queuing models were applied by Wieland (117) to predict root
delay, by Kim and Hansen (72) to study the effects of capacity and demand on delay levels at the
airports of New York area, and by Pyrgiotis et al. (99) to study delay propagation between some
airports.
Other simulations were done to analyze delay propagation concerning schedule stability (44)
and reliability (119) . Through simulations, different scenarios were commonly explored, such as
reliability or flexibility of airports under external conditions. Hansen et al. (59) considered the
congestion problem and designed a simple deterministic queuing model to analyze propagation
effects for subsequent flights of an airline and at Los Angeles International Airport.

3.4.5 Machine Learning

Machine learning is the research that explores the development of algorithms that can learn
from data and provide predictions based on it. Works that study flight systems are increas-
ing the usage of machine learning methods. The methods commonly used include k-Nearest
Neighbor, neural networks, SVM, fuzzy logic, and random forests. They were mainly used for
classification and prediction.
Rebollo et al. (102) applied random forests to predict root delay. They compared their ap-
proach with regression models to predict root delay in airports of the United States considering
time horizons of 2, 4, 6 and 24 hours. Their test errors grew as the forecast horizon increased.
Khanmohammadi et al. (69) created an adaptive network based on fuzzy inference system to
predict root delay. The predictions were used as an input for a fuzzy decision-making method
to sequence arrivals at JFK International Airport in New York.
Balakrishna et al. (10,11) used a reinforcement learning algorithm to predict taxi-out delays.
The problem was modeled through a Markov decision process and solved by a machine learn-
ing algorithm. When running their model 15 minutes before the scheduled time of departure,
authors achieved good performances at JFK International Airport in New York and Tampa Bay
International Airport.
Lu et al. (130) built a recommendation system to forecast delays at some airports due to
propagation effects. The prediction was based on the k-Nearest Neighbor algorithm and used
historical data to recognize similar situations in the past. The authors noticed fast response time
and easy, logical comprehension as the main advantages of their method.

4 Results and discussion

Since flight delays cause economic consequences to passengers and airlines, recognizing them
through prediction may improve marketing decisions. Due to that, several forecast models
have been built over the last twenty years. These models have sought to understand how delays
propagate through the network of flights or airports, to predict root delay in the system or to
comprehend the cancellation process. Beyond these three points of view for treating the flight
delay prediction problem, models could also differ by their scope of application, data issues
and methods.
The number of papers has increased in the late 2000s since 87.5% of the works had been
published between 2007 and 2017. Regarding only the documents considered in this analysis,
Figure 5.a displays the number of publications grouped by methods. It can be observed a
significant growth in machine learning (6) and data mining (17,77) in the last decade. Also, Figure
6 depicts the complete timeline of papers, showing most cited authors per period and categories
of methods. Pondering the way for tackling the delay problem, it was seen a balance between
the number of papers that consider delay propagation and root delay, while few works deemed
sole the cancellation analysis. Also, Figure 5.b indicates the foremost journals in which flight
delay material was published.
From Figures 6 and 7, it is possible to observe the leading authors in the field. Figure 7
displays the main collaboration graph from authors in our systematic review that had three or

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 20 15

15
10

qtd
10

0
0

JATM

TRPELTR

TRPCET

TRR

TRPAPP

TS

JAIS

JUE

SR
1997
1998

2001
2002

2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
journal
a b
legend ML OR NET PS STAT
Figure 5: (a) Publication in years according to main methods:  Statistical Analysis,  Proba-
bilistic Models,  Network Representation,  Operational Research,  Machine Learning;
(b) Journals of with major published papers in the subject

Years root delay or cancellation delay propagation

1997-2000  Wieland (117)  Boswell (24)  Beatty (16)
2001-2004  Hansen (59)  Mueller (90)  Evans (51)  Schaefer (106)  Abdelghany (2)
2005  Hsiao (62)  Hansen (60)  Wu (119)  Xu (123)
2006  Sim (107)  Lan (78)
2007  Wan (114)  Biesiada (22)  Abdel-Aty (1)
 Balakrishna (9)  Soomer (109)
2008  Lapp (79)  AhmadBeygi (3)
 McCrea (85)  Tu (112)  Pathomsiri (94)
2009  Pejovic (96)
2010  Balakrishna (10)  Ganesan (56)  Klein (73)  Ahmadbeygi (4)
2011  Gürbüz (58)  Evans (47)  Nayak (91)
2012  Wang (116)  Zou (132)  Azadian (7)  Dück (44)  Wong (118)
 Kulkarni (76)  Kim (72)  Evans (48)
2013  Pyrgiotis (99)  Fleurquin (55)
 Xiong (122)
2014  Rebollo (102)  Lin (82)  Baumgarten (15)  Campanelli (29)  Hao (61)
2015  Bloem (23)  Cai (28)  Jacquillat (65)  Ciruelos (35)  Cheng (32)
 Choi (34)  Castaing (31)  Bertsimas (20)
2016  Khanmohammadi (70)  Cong (36)
 Simaiakis (108)
 Takeichi (111)  Ding (42)  Baluch (13)
2017  Jayam (67)  Jacquillat (66)  Belkoura (18)  Ben Ahmed (19)
 Pérez–Rodrı́guez (100)

Figure 6: Time line of flight delay prediction publications:  Statistical Analysis,  Probabilis-
tic Models,  Network Representation,  Operational Research,  Machine Learning

more publications. The radius of each vertex indicates the number of papers published by each
author, whereas the strength of the edge indicates the degree of collaboration among the pair of
authors. Some authors do not contain connected edges, meaning that none of their collaborators
achieved three publications in our review.
According to data perspective, we divided our analysis into three parts: data sources, dimen-
sions and data management. From our review analysis, the adoption of data sources depends
mostly on the country or region where the study has been taken place. For example, in China,
most works were based on airport data, while in the United States the primary source was The
United States Department of Transportation (43) .
Dimensions were not directly related to the type of problem, but to the scope of application.
This characteristic is notable in this case. Attributes such as weather, capacity, and demand
were characteristics of airport or en route airspace scopes. On the other hand, airlines schedules
indicated scopes that considered airlines elements. It was also observed several ensembles of

10
 Li Xu Balakrishnan Fleurquin Cohn Odoni

Clarke Sherry Chen Wang Zhang Campanelli Eguiluz Ramasco

Ganesan Balakrishna Kulkarni Sridhar Hansen

Evans Kim Zou

Schäfer

Figure 7: Collaboration network of main authors in subject

different dimensions, showing that prediction models may be improved through the selection
of different attributes.
Data management was not specific to any problem or scope of application, and its use
is steadily growing. In fact, it is present in most of the machine learning models adopted,
primarily through data transformation. Most of the probabilistic models also considered outlier
removal and data transformations techniques. A small percentage of the statistical analysis,
network representation, and operational research methods applied general data management
techniques as well.

Figure 8: Trends in machine learning for flight delay prediction

Regarding the methods used to develop the prediction models, statistical analysis, and oper-
ational research were the most applied in the past. These approaches were well spread between
the three ways of treating the prediction problem. This same balance was also verified for
probabilistic models. On the other hand, network representation was mostly employed for
delay propagation.
It is worth mentioning that machine learning approaches experienced a notable growth in
the late 2000s, especially in root delay. In fact, both machine learning and data management

11
are positively correlated. The more machine learning is used, the more data management is
required. Especially, due to a trend in which extensive data is collected from sensors and IoT
devices (41,68,97,122,128) . In fact, this can be confirmed in Figure 8 that presents the cloud word
from papers published between 2015 and 2017 related to flight delays and machine learning.
Terms such as algorithm (12) , big data (33,38) , data model (37) , learn (57) , train-test (64) are becoming
more frequent. Such terminology is day-by-day becoming a trend for the next years.

5 Conclusion
Flight delays are an important subject in the literature due to their economic and environmental
impacts. They may increase costs to customers and operational costs to airlines. Apart from
outcomes directly related to passengers, delay prediction is crucial during the decision-making
process for every player in the air transportation system.
In this context, researchers created flight delay models for delay prediction over the last
years, and this work contributes with an analysis of these models from a Data Science perspec-
tive. We developed a taxonomy scheme and classified models in respect of detailed compo-
nents.
Mainly, the taxonomy includes domain and Data Science branches. The former branch cat-
egorizes the problem (flight delay prediction) and the scope. The last branch groups methods
and data handling. It was observed that the flight delay prediction is classified into two main
categories, such as delay propagation and root delay and cancellation. Besides, the scope de-
termines one of the three specific extents: airline, airport, en-route airspace or an ensemble of
them.
Additionally, considering Data Science branch, we aimed at the datum, by categorizing
data sources, dimensions that can be used in the models, and data management techniques to
preprocess data and improve prediction models efficiency. We also studied and divided the main
methods into five categories: statistical analysis, probabilistic models, network representation,
operations research, and machine learning. Those categories have been grouped as their use on
specific forecast models for flight delays.
Besides the taxonomic scheme, we also presented a timeline with all articles to spot trends
and relationships involving the main elements in the taxonomy. In the light of the domain-
problem classification, this timeline showed a dominance of delay propagation and root delay
over cancellation analysis. Researchers used to focus on statistical analysis and operational
research approaches in the past. However, as the data volume grows, we noticed the use of
machine learning and data management is increasing significantly. This clearly characterizes a
Data Science trend.
Researchers from airlines, airports, and academia will require a combination of skills of
both domain specialists and data scientists to enable knowledge discovery from flight Big Data.

Acknowledgments
The authors thank CNPq, CAPES, and FAPERJ for partially funding this research.

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