Airline Flight Data Analysis – Part 2 – Analyzing On-Time Performance

In my last post on this topic, we loaded the Airline On-Time Performance data set collected by the United States Department of Transportation into a Parquet file to greatly improve the speed at which the data can be analyzed. Now, let’s take a first look at the data by graphing the average airline-caused flight delay by airline. This is a rather straightforward analysis, but is a good one to get started with the data set. Open a Jupyter python notebook on the cluster in the first cell indicate that we will be using MatPlotLib to do graphing: %matplotlib inline Then, in the next cell load data frames for the airline on time activity and airline meta data based on the parquet files built in the last post. Note that I am using QFS as my distributed file system. If you are using HDFS, simply update the file URLs as needed. air_data = spark.read.parquet(‘qfs://master:20000/user/michael/data/airline_data’) airlines = spark.read.parquet(‘qfs://master:20000/user/michael/data/airline_id_table’) Now we are ready to process Read More …