Statistical prediction of aircraft trajectory : regression methods vs point-mass model

International audienceGround-based aircraft trajectory prediction is a critical issue for air traffic management. A safe and efficient prediction is a prerequisite for the implementation of automated tools that detect and solve conflicts between trajectories. Moreover, regarding the safety constraints, it could be more reasonable to predict intervals rather than precise aircraft positions . In this paper, a standard point-mass model and statistical regression method is used to predict the altitude of climbing aircraft. In addition to the standard linear regression model, two common non-linear regression methods, neural networks and Loess are used. A dataset is extracted from two months of radar and meteorological recordings, and several potential explanatory variables are computed for every sampled climb segment. A Principal Component Analysis allows us to reduce the dimensionality of the problems, using only a subset of principal components as input to the regression methods. The prediction models are scored by performing a 10-fold cross-validation. Statistical regression results method appears promising. The experiment part shows that the proposed regression models are much more efficient than the standard point-mass model. The prediction intervals obtained by our methods have the advantage of being more reliable and narrower than those found by point-mass model