Forecasting airline passengers is crucial for airlines to plan efficiently, optimize costs, and enhance customer satisfaction.
Machine learning is extensively utilized in predicting airline passenger numbers accurately based on historical data.
The process of building a forecasting model involves steps like data collection, preprocessing, feature engineering, model selection, training, and evaluation.
Data collection includes gathering historical passenger counts and incorporating external factors like weather, holidays, and economic indicators.
Data preprocessing involves cleaning data, handling missing values, detecting outliers, and formatting dates for analysis.
Feature engineering creates new variables to help the model understand trends, seasonality, and patterns in the data.
Model selection is crucial, with options like ARIMA, Prophet, XGBoost, LightGBM, and LSTM, depending on the data characteristics and problem.
Training and testing the model involve splitting the dataset, hyperparameter tuning, and cross-validation for accurate predictions.
Evaluation metrics such as MSE, RMSE, MAE, and R² are essential for assessing the model's performance and accuracy.
MSE penalizes large errors heavily, while RMSE gives the average error in the same unit as the data.