Decision Support Models for Predicting and Explaining Airport Passenger Connectivity From Data

Marta Guimarães, Cláudia Soares, Rodrigo Ventura

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Predicting if passengers in a connecting flight will lose their connection is paramount for airline profitability. We present novel machine learning-based decision support models for the different stages of connection flight management, namely for strategic, pre-tactical, tactical and post-operations. We predict missed flight connections in an airline's hub airport using historical data on flights and passengers, and analyse the factors that contribute additively to the predicted outcome for each decision horizon. Our data is high-dimensional, heterogeneous, imbalanced and noisy, and does not inform about passenger arrival/departure transit time. We employ probabilistic encoding of categorical classes, data balancing with Gaussian Mixture Models, and boosting. For all planning horizons, our models attain an under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) higher than 0.93. SHAP value explanations of our models indicate that scheduled/perceived connection times contribute the most to the prediction, followed by passenger age and whether border controls are required.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)16005 - 16015
Number of pages11
JournalIEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
Volume23
Issue number9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Sept 2022

Keywords

  • Airline schedule planning
  • data-driven operations
  • decision support models.
  • imbalanced classification
  • model explanations

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