A Spatio-Temporal Approach with Self-Corrective Causal Inference for Flight Delay Prediction

TL;DR

This paper introduces CausalNet, a novel self-corrective spatio-temporal graph neural network that models complex inter-airport causal relationships for more accurate flight delay prediction, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a new causal inference-based framework with a self-correction mechanism for dynamic inter-airport relationship modeling in flight delay prediction.

Findings

CausalNet outperforms baseline models on Chinese airport data.

Self-correction enhances the accuracy of causality graphs.

Graph feature extraction improves prediction performance.

Abstract

Accurate flight delay prediction is crucial for the secure and effective operation of the air traffic system. Recent advances in modeling inter-airport relationships present a promising approach for investigating flight delay prediction from the multi-airport scenario. However, the previous prediction works only accounted for the simplistic relationships such as traffic flow or geographical distance, overlooking the intricate interactions among airports and thus proving inadequate. In this paper, we leverage causal inference to precisely model inter-airport relationships and propose a self-corrective spatio-temporal graph neural network (named CausalNet) for flight delay prediction. Specifically, Granger causality inference coupled with a self-correction module is designed to construct causality graphs among airports and dynamically modify them based on the current airport's delays. Additionally, the features of the causality graphs are adaptively extracted and utilized to address the heterogeneity of airports. Extensive experiments are conducted on the real data of top-74 busiest airports in China. The results show that CausalNet is superior to baselines. Ablation studies emphasize the power of the proposed self-correction causality graph and the graph feature extraction module. All of these prove the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.