Data Science in R

Chapter 5

Strategies for Analyzing a 12-Gigabyte Data Set: Airline Flight Delays

Michael Kane

Yale University

5.1 Introduction

Anyone who has dealt with flight delays at the airport understands the associated inconvenience and aggravation. And while we might hope that delays are rare, they are probably more common than you think. Since October 1987, there have been over 50 million flights in the United States that failed to depart at their scheduled times. Around 200,000 of those flights were at least two hours late; some were much later. From these two simple facts we can surmise that delays are not isolated, rare events; they are routine. Since 1987 the number of flights per year has steadily increased and as this trend continues we expect ...