Predicting flight departure delay at Porto Airport: a preliminary study

Abstract

Managing an airport is very complex. Decisions are often based on common sense and influence several variables, such as flight delay. This paper considers the problem of predicting flight departure delay at Porto Airport. As far as we know, this the first study on the subject. The problem is treated as an ordinal classification task and a suitable approach, based on the so-called unimodal model, is used to predict the delay. The unimodal model is implemented using neural networks and, for comparison purposes, also using trees.