A Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Algorithms For The Purpose of Predicting Norwegian Air Passenger Traffic

Abstract

This analysis aims to provide an overview of potential machine learning algorithms that may aid the aviation industry in predicting future air passenger traffic flow, which can help increase stakeholder value as well as improve customer experiences. A review and discussion of the aviation industry’s past, current, and future challenges is provided, as well as an overview of machine learning algorithms, neural networks, and learning methods. Further, an overview and discussion of the architecture of the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, Support Vector Regression Machine (SVRM), and Random Forest (RF) algorithms is provided. The comparative analysis provides an overview and comparison of the performance of the LSTM, SVRM, and RF models based on Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE). The dataset used includes the hourly number of passengers from scheduled flights at Oslo Airport Gardermoen for the period of January 1, 2009, to December 31, 2019, including the datetime features such as Time (hour), day, month, and year, as well as the weather features of air temperature and mean wind speed, with a total of 96185 samples. The Long Short-Term Memory model exhibited the highest generalization ability, with a performance evaluation on the testing dataset of 0.00445/0.06667 MSE/RMSE. Additionally, the performance of the SVRM and RF models on the testing dataset is 0.00511/0.07147 and 0.00543/0.07368 MSE/RMSE respectively. In addition to the performance, each of the models’ complexity, stability, and ability to predict the hourly and daily fluctuations of passengers are discussed.