We consider the problem of efficiently constructing cheap and novel round trip flight itineraries by combining legs from different airlines. We analyse the factors that contribute towards the price of such itineraries and find that many result from the combination of just 30 of airlines and that the closer the departure of such itineraries is to the user's search date the more likely they are to be cheaper than the tickets from one airline. We use these insights to formulate the problem as a trade-off between the recall of cheap itinerary constructions and the costs associated with building them. We propose a supervised learning solution with location embeddings which achieves an AUC=80.48, a substantial improvement over simpler baselines. We discuss various practical considerations for dealing with the staleness and the stability of the model and present the design of the machine learning pipeline. Finally, we present an analysis of the model's performance in production and its impact on Skyscanner's users.
The problem of airline fare prediction is discussed in detail in @cite_16 and several data mining models were benchmarked in @cite_10 . The authors of @cite_19 modelled 3D trajectories of flights based on various weather and air traffic conditions. The problem of itinerary relevance ranking in one of the largest Global Distributed Systems was presented in @cite_18 . The systematic patterns of airline delays were analysed in @cite_4 . And the impact of airport network structure on the spread of global pandemics was weighed up in @cite_15 .
@cite_18 @cite_4 @cite_19 @cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_10
2743586218 2333507536 2782920454 2107381919
Travel providers such as airlines and on-line travel agents are becoming more and more interested in understanding how passengers choose among alternative itineraries when searching for flights. This knowledge helps them better display and adapt their offer, taking into account market conditions and customer needs. Some common applications are not only filtering and sorting alternatives, but also changing certain attributes in real-time (e.g., changing the price). In this paper, we concentrate with the problem of modeling air passenger choices of flight itineraries. This problem has historically been tackled using classical Discrete Choice Modelling techniques. Traditional statistical approaches, in particular the Multinomial Logit model (MNL), is widely used in industrial applications due to its simplicity and general good performance. However, MNL models present several shortcomings and assumptions that might not hold in real applications. To overcome these difficulties, we present a new choice model based on Pointer Networks. Given an input sequence, this type of deep neural architecture combines Recurrent Neural Networks with the Attention Mechanism to learn the conditional probability of an output whose values correspond to positions in an input sequence. Therefore, given a sequence of different alternatives presented to a customer, the model can learn to point to the one most likely to be chosen by the customer. The proposed method was evaluated on a real dataset that combines on-line user search logs and airline flight bookings. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the traditional MNL model on several metrics. A machine learning approach to trajectory prediction for sequencing and merging of traffic following fixed arrival routes is described and evaluated using actual aircraft trajectory and meteorological data. In the approach a model is trained using historic data to make arrival time predictions. Model inputs are the aircraft type, aircraft ground speed and altitude at the start of the arrival route, surface wind, and altitude winds. A stepwise regression method is used to systematically determine the inputs and functions of inputs that are included in the prediction model based on their explanatory power. For the evaluation of the approach a 45 NM fixed arrival route was used that ends at the runway. Traffic performed a continuous descent operation. At a prediction horizon of 45 NM the model explained 63 of the observed variance in the arrival time. The mean absolute time error was 18 s. Finally, the prediction model was used to determine the required initial spacing interval between aircraft for continuous descent operation and examine the impact on runway throughput and conflicts. Using the prediction model, throughput increased by up to 4 aircraft per hour compared to a constant initial spacing. Predicting passenger pickup dropoff demands based on historical mobility trips has been of great importance towards better vehicle distribution for the emerging mobility-on-demand (MOD) services. Prior works focused on predicting next-step passenger demands at selected locations or hotspots. However, we argue that multi-step citywide passenger demands encapsulate both time-varying demand trends and global statuses, and hence are more beneficial to avoiding demand-service mismatching and developing effective vehicle distribution scheduling strategies. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep neural network solution to the prediction task. We employ the encoder-decoder framework based on convolutional and ConvLSTM units to identify complex features that capture spatiotemporal influences and pickup-dropoff interactions on citywide passenger demands. A novel attention model is incorporated to emphasize the effects of latent citywide mobility regularities. We evaluate our proposed method using real-word mobility trips (taxis and bikes) and the experimental results show that our method achieves higher prediction accuracy than the adaptations of the state-of-the-art approaches. Predictable allocations of security resources such as police officers, canine units, or checkpoints are vulnerable to exploitation by attackers. Recent work has applied game-theoretic methods to find optimal randomized security policies, including a fielded application at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). This approach has promising applications in many similar domains, including police patrolling for subway and bus systems, randomized baggage screening, and scheduling for the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) on commercial flights. However, the existing methods scale poorly when the security policy requires coordination of many resources, which is central to many of these potential applications. We develop new models and algorithms that scale to much more complex instances of security games. The key idea is to use a compact model of security games, which allows exponential improvements in both memory and runtime relative to the best known algorithms for solving general Stackelberg games. We develop even faster algorithms for security games under payoff restrictions that are natural in many security domains. Finally, introduce additional realistic scheduling constraints while retaining comparable performance improvements. The empirical evaluation comprises both random data and realistic instances of the FAMS and LAX problems. Our new methods scale to problems several orders of magnitude larger than the fastest known algorithm.