Predicting Airline Delays

I don't know about all of you, but flying doesn't always go smoothly for me. I have had some horror stories I could tell you about weird delays I have encountered while flying. Wouldn't it be nice to know how much your flight will probably be delayed and why? Well, that's what this project will attempt to do. Granted, the data scientists over at Hortonworks did a very similar project (and a well done one in my opinion!) just a few months ago. My project will be a little different from theirs in that instead of doing a classification problem (yes/no for a delayed flight), this will be a regression problem where I will try to predict the delay time in number of minutes (which can be negative). The regression model will not be restricted to a single city, so we are going to be working with a very large number of training examples! To complete this project, we need some data about flights. Fortunately, the government keeps such a resource available that we are going to examine in this project. Similar to the project about faculty salaries, this post will be split into two major parts: exploratory data analysis and feature engineering in R, with regression model implementation in Python.