Forecast of Aviation Traffic in Indonesia Based on Google Trend and Macroeconomic Data using Long Short-Term Memory

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted many sectors. For example, in the aviation sector, flight traffic went down drastically with no certainty of being recovered. This calls for a methodology to predict the flight traffic to provide strategic planning on flight schedules operational, route structuring, and flight navigation service cost determination. However, current developments mainly focus on flight traffic forecasting based on historical data without considering external factors. In this study, we propose the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) technique to forecast flight traffic in Indonesia involving external variables such as macroeconomic variables and Google Trends. LSTM is proposed because of its flexibility to model non-linear time series data and has a good reputation for predictive accuracy. We first select a few among Google Trends and macroeconomic variables using nonlinearity analysis and cross-correlation function (CCF). We then employ the selected variables to forecast the flight traffic and compare it to the one using only historical flight traffic data. Our results concluded, based on the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), that the model involving google trend outperforms the other three models, i.e., the model with only historical data, the model with macroeconomics, and the model with both macroeconomic and Google Trends. It is because, in this digital era, Google Trends can reflect population psychology in an up-to-date manner.