Proc. of 2020 7th Int. Conf. on Information Tech.

, Computer, and Electrical Engineering (ICITACEE)

Predicting Future Potential Flight Routes via

Inductive Graph Representation Learning
Arie Wahyu Wijayanto Farid Ridho
Department of Computational Statistics Department of Computational Statistics
Politeknik Statistika STIS Politeknik Statistika STIS
Jakarta, Indonesia Jakarta, Indonesia
ariewahyu@stis.ac.id faridr@stis.ac.id

Abstract—Air transport activity has been considered as an

important part of modern societies with high demand for
massive scale mobilizations. One of the fundamental challenges
in air transportation is to predict future potential flight routes
connecting newly developed cities around the world. In this pa-
per, we aim to solve the flight routes prediction problem under
graph theory perspective as a link prediction task by mapping
the existing airports as graph vertices and flight routes as
graph links. We generate low-dimensional feature vectors of
vertices by learning the embedding function. For each selected
vertex in the input network, we sample the neighborhood
and aggregate feature information from neighbors to predict
and generalize to unseen links and vertices. The effectiveness
of our prediction approach is shown using the Open Flights
database containing 568 airlines with 65,535 routes between
3,425 airports. The promising performance of 90% accuracy
is gained by the prediction model.
Keywords—graph representation learning, graph mining,
network embedding, link prediction, air transportation net-
work

I. I NTRODUCTION
The vast distances among major cities around the world
lead to heavy demand for air transport activities [1]. To
meet the requirement of interconnectivity, air transportation
has also become comfortable means of travel in many
existing remote areas [2, 3]. On the other hand, the cur-
rent advancement in automatic data collection technologies
provides an abundant amount of traffic data including air
flight trajectories among countries [4]. However, a crucial
challenge remains unaddressed, that is how to accurately
predict the future potential flight routes among major cities
airports.
Predicting future potential flight routes is of great impor-
tance to support the comprehensive infrastructure planning
and tourism demand forecasting [4, 5]. It is also benefi-
cial for local governments to anticipate future growth of
passenger arrivals, aircraft movements, and cargo demands.
Further, the airline industry could also efficiently plan and
optimize flight frequency for each designated airports.
Networks are useful models that can represent and ana-
lyze the structures of real-world complex systems, such as
the flight routes interconnection between airports. Networks
are also known as graphs in the graph theory and discrete
mathematics language [6, 7]. We may analyze and exploit
Fig. 1. Illustration of the flight routes prediction problem.
the network structure and the features of vertices to uncover
valuable hidden information [8, 9]. In this paper, we take
the graph theory perspective to map the routes prediction
problem into the link prediction problem where the graph
vertices represent airports and the graph links represent
flight routes.
The link prediction problem aims to discover missing
links and predict the emergence of potential future links
in networks based on the observed features of links and
vertices [5]. Node and edge are also termed as vertex and
link in the discrete mathematics language. In this paper,
we use those terms interchangeably. Given the network
structure and features of the vertices, we construct the
low-dimensional feature vector of vertices by the learnable
embedding function. The embedding function is learned by
sampling the vertices and aggregating their local neigh-
borhood feature information. Therefore, accurate predictors
can be applied to discover the most potential latent links.
This inductive approach is also cost-efficient than naively
checking all possible link combinations.
Using the OpenFlights database of 65,535 flight routes

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 between 3,425 airports, we show the effectiveness of our
prediction approach. Our proposed approach potentially
beneficial for the airline industry to anticipate and capture
more crucial market opportunities.
II. P RELIMINARIES
A. Flight Routes Prediction Problem
We first define the flight routes prediction problem as
follows. Given the network G as the existing network of
flight routes among a set of airports V , the objective is
to predict the future possible flight within the network G
connecting the subset of airports in V .
Figure 1 shows a schematic illustration of this problem.
Using the existing flight routes (shown in blue-colored line),
we aim to get the predicted future flight routes (shown in
red-colored dashed line).
B. Link Prediction Problem
Link prediction is widely known in many daily applica-
tions such as giving friendship recommendation in social
networks, proposing items to purchase in e-commerce, and
showing suitable matches in online dating applications [3,
5, 10, 11]. We can utilize link prediction to predict missing
links in an incomplete data or to predict future possible
links [12–15]. Formally, given an input static network or
a snapshot of dynamic network G, in the link prediction
problem, we aim to infer the most likely links to form in
the network based on a partially observed current network
of G.
C. Graph Representation Learning
The fundamental objective of graph representation learn-
ing is to preserve the topology and features of graph-
structured data and extract its valuable information into low-
dimensional space [16–18]. Most studies in learning the
graph representation can be roughly categorized into two
classes: (1) graph Laplacian regularization, which includes
manifold regularization and label propagation, and (2) graph
embedding approaches.
In this paper, we will focus on the graph embedding
approaches. For each node in the input network, the graph
embedding approach will encode it into a d-dimensional
real-valued feature vector. Figure 2 illustrates the embed-
ding process in detail. Node v is encoded by the embedding
function f : v → µv into its feature vector representation
µv with length d.
III. R ELATED W ORK
In this section, we will review the related work of
existing methods in the link prediction problem. Some most
popular works include Node2vec [19], Graph Convolutional
Network (GCN) [20], and Graph Attention Network (GAT)
[21].
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A. Node2vec
Node2vec introduced a node embedding approach based
on biased random walk using Skip-Gram strategy. It itera-
tively maps each node in a graph into a low-dimensional
feature space which maximizes the log-probability of pre-
serving global neighborhoods of nodes. Let G = (V, E) be
an input network with set of nodes V and set of edges E.
For each node v ∈ V and NS(v) ⊂ V as neighbors of v
generated by Skip-Gram sampling strategy, Node2vec aim
to maximize the following objective function:
X
max log P r(NS(v) |f (v)), (1)
f
v∈V
where f : V → Rd is the mapping function of node
into feature space with d number of dimensions. P r(·)
denotes the likelihood or probability that will be maximized.
Node2vec embedding algorithm is one of the most popular
benchmark for graph representation learning.
B. Graph Convolutional Network (GCN)
GCN follows the ideas of the convolutional neural net-
work (CNN) into graph-structured data by convolving the
input graph directly according to the connectivity structure
of the graph. GCN utilizes a layer-wise propagation ap-
proach by approximating first-order spectral graph convo-
lutions in each layer to represent one-hop local neighbor-
hoods. The resulted hidden layer representations are able to
preserve not only the feature of each node but also the local
subgraph structure.
Let us consider a simple two-layer GCN and an input
graph G with adjacency matrix A and graph Laplacian
matrix L. The resulted GCN feature vectors Z of nodes
in graph G will be calculated as follows:
Z = sof tmax(L ReLU (LXW1 )W2 ), (2)
where X, W1 , and W2 are the matrix of nodes feature,
weight matrix of the first and second hidden layer re-
spectively. ReLU is a rectified linear unit activation func-
tion. Softmax is an activation function which computes
1
sof tmax(x
P i ) = Z exp(xi ) in a row-wise manner when
Z = i exp(xi ).
C. Graph Attention Network (GAT)
In GAT, we assume that the contributions of neighbor-
ing nodes to the focused node are neither pre-determined
like GCN nor identical like GraphSAGE. GAT learns the
relative weights among connected nodes by utilizing at-
tention mechanisms. GAT constructs each node represen-
tation adaptively from the combination of its neighborhood
vectors. The attention is computed as adjustable weights
on different connecting neighbors. The attention is then
iteratively updated based on the feature vector of local
neighboring nodes.
The graph convolutional operation in GAT is calculated
as follows,
 Fig. 2. Schematic illustration of vertex embedding.

B. Inductive Graph Representation Learning

X
h(k)
v = σ( (k)
αvu W (k) h(k−1)
u ), (3) Given a graph as input with its selected node features, we
u∈N (v)∪v need a node embedding method to learn and preserve the
structural neighborhood information of each node. The lim-
(0) (k)
where hv = xv . The attention weight αvu measures the itation of some existing graph representation learning such
connective strength between the node v and its neighbor u as Node2vec [19] and DeepWalk [24] is its transductive
as follows: fashion. The transductive learning requires to learn from
the whole graph to construct the embedding of each node.
Hence, if any new nodes are introduced to the existing input
(k)
αvu = f (g(aT [W (k) h(k−1)
v ||W (k) h(k−1)
u ])), (4) graph, the embedding process needs to be constructed from
scratch.
where f (·) and g(·) are softmax and LeakyReLU ac- In inductive graph representation learning, to deal with
tivation function respectively. a is a vector of learnable the issue, the embedding method is required to create
parameters. W (k) is the weight matrix of the corresponding the feature vector of new nodes without re-training the
k-th attention mechanism. whole node embedding. The common approach to achieve
inductive learning is by introducing the aggregator function
IV. F LIGHT ROUTES P REDICTION WITH I NDUCTIVE from nodes features and neighborhood structure to induce
G RAPH R EPRESENTATION L EARNING the embedding of any new nodes.
We utilize Graph Sample and Aggregate (GraphSAGE)
A. Feature Extraction and Selection method to learn inductively the low-dimensional feature
We evaluate our proposed methods on real-world airflight vector of nodes in the given input graph. GraphSAGE learns
network datasets, which summarized in Table I. OpenFlights node embedding through a general inductive framework
dataset is a directed network of regular flights connecting consisting of several feature aggregators [25]. In each
more than three thousands airports and consists of more iteration, GraphSAGE aims to solve the memory bottleneck
than sixty thousands flight routes [22, 23]. The self-loop problem by sampling a fixed-size neighborhood, after that
nodes are removed from the dataset. it computes a specific aggregator over feature extractor.
The sampling strategy in GraphSAGE yields impressive
TABLE I. STATISTICS OF DATASET performance on node labeling tasks over several large-scale
networks.
Name #nodes #edges #features
GraphSAGE commonly adopts supervised node classi-
OpenFlights 3,425 65,535 738 fication tasks as the evaluation benchmark with the as-
sumption that a better embedding algorithm leads to higher
node classification accuracy. Given a graph and its features,
The following flight-route 738 features are extracted from GraphSAGE generates a vector representation of each node
the dataset and selected as input: zv for all v ∈ V as follows:
• Codeshare (1 feature)
hkN (v) = aggk (hk−1
u , ∀u ∈ N (v)), (5)
• Stop (1 feature)
• Airlines (568 features) where aggk (·) is the aggregator function of k-layers (∀k ∈
• Equipment (168 features) 1, ..., k) denoting the information aggregation from k-hop

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 node neighborhoods as well as the corresponding weight
matrices W k . N (v) is the set of neighboring nodes of v.

hkv = σ(W k · concat(hk−1

v , hN (v)k )) (6)
where concat(·) is the concatenation function of node’s
recent vector representation hk−1
v with its aggregated neigh-
borhood information hN (v)k .
V. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
A. Evaluation Criteria
To evaluate the link prediction task, we need to measure
the performance of our method as a binary classifier in
predicting the existence of an edge of the given two vertices.
In order to train any link prediction models, we need to
provide the train and test sets of edges and the modified
graphs where those edges removed. In this work, the input
graph is split into a train and test set where each of them
should have the same number of nodes but a different
number of edges.
From the original graph G, we perform a uniformly ran-
dom sampling to extract the subset of negative samples and
positive samples. The negative sample consists of node pairs Fig. 3. Accuracy and loss on train and validation set during the
where there exist no edge connecting them. The positive initial 100 epochs training.
sample contains some pairs of nodes that are connected by
edges. The test set Gtest is resulted by removing all positive
samples from the original graph G. To get the training
set Gtrain , we use a similar procedure from the reduced
original graph G. To quantify the performance comparison
of link prediction methods, we use the standard evaluation
metrics, accuracy, and loss.
B. Effectiveness Evaluation
The resulted performance of the trained GraphSAGE
model on the train set Gtrain and test set Gtest are as
follows:
• On the train set, loss and accuracy are 22.22% and
93.36% respectively
• On the test set, loss and accuracy are 24.72% and
90.00% respectively
C. Experimental Setting
In this work, we select 50% random edges of the input
network to be utilized as a test set Gtest . The remaining
Fig. 4. Visualization of the resulted low-dimensional space of
50% of edges are used as the training set. All node features node embeddings generated using TSNE method.
are converted into numeric values as input vectors. The
fraction of 10% random edges are selected from the test the first 100 epochs. In the early epochs, the model begin
set as positive and negative samples respectively. The same with quite low accuracies, less than 70% and able to
fraction number applies to the training set. gain 85% accuracy after 5 epochs. After 100 epochs, the
To build the prediction model, we take a 2-layer archi- model achieves 93.36% and 90.00% on training and testing
tecture with the hidden layer sizes of 50 for both layers, set respectively. As both results show a similar accuracy
a bias term, dropout rate of 0.3, and batch size 20. The performance, the proposed model is quite able to avoid the
experiments are performed on the Google Collaboratory overfitting issue.
[26] and we implement the simulation using Stellar Graph The visualization of the low-dimensional feature space
library [27] build under TensorFlow and Keras. of node in Openflights network is shown in Figure 4
Figure 3 shows the training history of the trained Graph- build under TSNE visualization. Each point (shown in blue
SAGE model on the train and test (validation) set during colored dot) represents a node in the airflight network,

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 Fig. 5. Problem mapping.
which is the airport. In two dimensional plot, using two
TSNE-generated variables we see some airports naturally
form some clusters due to their attributes similarities. The
deeper exploration of similarities among airports and flight
routes opens another interesting investigation and is left for
our future work.
VI. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we have addressed the problem of predict-
ing future potential flight routes using an inductive graph
representation learning. Specifically, we map the problem
of flight routes prediction into a graph link prediction using
vector/node embedding, as illustrated in Figure 5. We use
a real-world airport and flight-route dataset to show the
effectiveness of our proposed approach which could be
beneficial to capture the growing market opportunities. The
promising performance of 90% accuracy is shown by the
prediction model. Our future work includes the exploration
of the most influential features of airports and flight routes
which determine the likelihood of two or more airports
being connected and the strength of their connection.
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