Aeolus: A Multi-structural Flight Delay Dataset

TL;DR

Aeolus is a comprehensive, multi-modal flight delay dataset that captures spatiotemporal dynamics and relational structures, enabling advanced research in delay prediction and foundation models for structured data.

Contribution

The paper introduces Aeolus, a large-scale multi-modal dataset with aligned tabular, sequential, and graph data for flight delays, addressing limitations of existing datasets.

Findings

Provides over 50 million flights data with rich features

Models delay propagation through flight chains and network graphs

Supports diverse tasks like regression, classification, and graph learning

Abstract

We introduce Aeolus, a large-scale Multi-modal Flight Delay Dataset designed to advance research on flight delay prediction and support the development of foundation models for tabular data. Existing datasets in this domain are typically limited to flat tabular structures and fail to capture the spatiotemporal dynamics inherent in delay propagation. Aeolus addresses this limitation by providing three aligned modalities: (i) a tabular dataset with rich operational, meteorological, and airportlevel features for over 50 million flights; (ii) a flight chain module that models delay propagation along sequential flight legs, capturing upstream and downstream dependencies; and (iii) a flight network graph that encodes shared aircraft, crew, and airport resource connections, enabling cross-flight relational reasoning. The dataset is carefully constructed with temporal splits, comprehensive features, and strict leakage prevention to support realistic and reproducible machine learning evaluation. Aeolus supports a broad range of tasks, including regression, classification, temporal structure modeling, and graph learning, serving as a unified benchmark across tabular, sequential, and graph modalities. We release baseline experiments and preprocessing tools to facilitate adoption. Aeolus fills a key gap for both domain-specific modeling and general-purpose structured data research.Our source code and data can be accessed at https://github.com/Flnny/Delay-data