A New Multilevel Input Layer Artificial Neural Network for Predicting Flight Delays at JFK Airport

One of the biggest problems for major airline is predicting flight delay. Airlines try to reduce delays to gain the loyalty of their customers. Hence, a prediction model that airliners can use to forecast possible delays is of significant importance. In this regards, artificial neural network (ANN) techniques can be beneficial for this application. One of the main challenges of using ANNs is handling nominal variables. 1-of-N encoding is widely used to deal with this problem, however, this method is known to reduce the performance of ANN's by introducing multicollinearity. In this paper, we introduce a new type of multilevel input layer ANN that can handle nominal variables and is interpretable in a sense that one can easily see the relationships between different input variables and output variables. As a case study, the proposed method was applied to predict the delay of incoming flights at JFK airport, where the neurons of each sublayer of the input layer symbolize the delay sources at different levels of the system, and the activation of each neuron represents the possibility of being the source of overall delay. Finally, we compared the proposed approach with the traditional gradient descent back propagation ANN model and the proposed model was able to outperform the traditional backpropagation method in terms of the prediction error (root mean squared error) and time required to train the ANN model.