Abstract
The prediction of flight delays is one of the important and challenging issues in the field of scheduling and planning flights by airports and airlines. Therefore, in recent years, we have witnessed various methods to solve this problem using machine learning techniques. In this article, a new method is proposed to address these issues. In the proposed method, a group of potential indicators related to flight delay is introduced, and a combination of ANOVA and the Forward Sequential Feature Selection (FSFS) algorithm is used to determine the most influential indicators on flight delays. To overcome the challenges related to large flight data volumes, a clustering strategy based on the DBSCAN algorithm is employed. In this approach, samples are clustered into similar groups, and a separate learning model is used to predict flight delays for each group. This strategy allows the problem to be decomposed into smaller sub-problems, leading to improved prediction system performance in terms of accuracy (by 2.49%) and processing speed (by 39.17%). The learning model used in each cluster is a novel structure based on a random forest, where each tree component is optimized and weighted using the Coyote Optimization Algorithm (COA). Optimizing the structure of each tree component and assigning weighted values to them results in a minimum 5.3% increase in accuracy compared to the conventional random forest model. The performance of the proposed method in predicting flight delays is tested and compared with previous research. The findings demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves an average accuracy of 97.2% which indicates a 4.7% improvement compared to previous efforts.