This week, we switched gears from basics of data wrangling process to build regression models using R programming language. Earlier, we learnt regression modeling using SAS programming language, and now we will do the same but using R. During the class exercise, we used R to rebuild our previous housing price prediction model which we coded in SAS. Both SAS and R regression predicted similar results for the given dataset. It was exciting to observe what we could do with SAS programming, we could do almost everything with R. It was pretty neat to see that R being an open-source programming language, it is as powerful tool as SAS, and in fact, R produced graphics/charts were better than SAS and needed much less coding. This exercise gave us confidence that we can code in both languages, and now I am curious to see whether I will find it easier to code and analyze data with SAS or R, and which programming language I will use more often as both SAS and R have their advantages and disadvantages.
In this week’s coding assignment, we had to analyze real data set of different airlines to figure out which flight path consistently was on-time, and which flight path suffered from frequent delays. Based on the actual flight data, we built a regression model to predict if the flight of certain airlines will be delayed or not. It was very interesting to see all the things that we found out. Since we used real data set, I can see our analysis being very useful when we need to choose an airport which can help us avoid a flight delay. This could also be helpful for airlines company to predict airline delays caused by various factors. Moreover, it could give individual airlines and airports an analysis of their performance thus helping them making a well-assessed decision.
For our assignment, we pulled the data on Airline On-Time Performance and Causes of Flight Delays from from Data.gov website for Department of Transportation, where we looked at 570,131 observations with 110 variables. From those observations, we looked were able to answer the following questions:
1. How many flights experienced delays?
2. What days of the week is the worst days for flight delays?
3. Which destination airport experienced more delays?
4. Top 10 flight path that had most delaysBased on the data, we were able to find out that while roughly 82% of the flights were on time, almost 18% of the flights were delayed.
Figure 1 Monday (22.4%), Tuesday (19.17%) and Friday (18.71%) had the most number of flight delays.
Figure 2a 
Figure 2b We narrowed down the top 10 destination airports that experienced the most delays. Of the top ten, EWR (27%), PHX (26%), LGA (26%), BOS (25%), and SFO (23%) were the top five airports that had most delays.
Figure 3 Below are the top 10 flight paths that had the most flight delays. FWA to ORD route was the top flight to experience most delays.
Figure 4
Working with real data is an exciting experiment; I feel that it makes the process of learning and practicing much easier and practical. As excited as I am to add one more programming language to my skill set, regardless that coding is still a bit of a challenge to me, I have come to realize that this challenge is also driving my motivation. As Franklin D. Roosevelt once said “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor”, I am up for this challenge. Moreover, converting big data into actionable insights, and being able to come up with business solutions is the main thing I wanted to learn from this MSBA program, and being able to do that in class assignments makes my learning journey much more fascinating and interesting.
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Citation
@misc{shrestha2019,
author = {Mohit Shrestha},
title = {Analyze {Airlines} Flight Delays},
date = {2019-08-05},
url = {https://www.mohitshrestha.com.np/posts/2019-08-05-analyze-airlines-flight delays},
langid = {en}
}