Alright, let me tell you about messing around with the Genova Cristoforo Colombo Airport data. It was a bit of a dive, but got some cool stuff out of it.
So, first thing I did was hunt down the data itself. I mean, what’s the point without the goods, right? Found some publicly available datasets online – mostly flight schedules, arrival/departure info, and some basic airport stats. Nothing too crazy, but enough to get my hands dirty.
Next up, cleaning that mess. You know how it is, right? Different formats, missing values, all that jazz. I used Python with Pandas library mostly. Loaded the data into dataframes, dropped duplicates, filled in some missing bits where it made sense. A lot of `*()` and `*()` kind of stuff. Basic, but essential.
Then came the fun part – trying to make sense of it all.
- Started with some simple analysis. What airlines fly there most often? Which destinations are most popular? I used `groupby()` and `count()` in Pandas to get those numbers. Visualized it all with Matplotlib – simple bar charts and pie charts.
- Dug a little deeper into flight delays. Checked which times of day had the most delays, which airlines were the worst offenders. Calculated average delay times and plotted them. This was pretty interesting, actually.
- Tried to correlate weather data (which I grabbed from another source) with flight delays. See if there was a connection between rain or wind and how often flights were late. The correlation wasn’t super strong, but there was a little something there.
After that, I messed around with trying to predict arrival delays. This was more of a challenge. I built a simple model using scikit-learn. Used stuff like departure time, airline, destination, day of the week as features. Trained the model on historical data and then tried to predict future delays. Not super accurate, but it was a good learning experience. It was a basic linear regression, nothing fancy.
Finally, I put all my findings into a little report with some charts and tables. Nothing too formal, just a summary of what I learned. Figured it might be useful to someone. And that was it, my little adventure with the Genova airport data. Nothing groundbreaking, but I learned a bunch!
