Book Image

R Data Science Essentials

Book Image

R Data Science Essentials

Overview of this book

With organizations increasingly embedding data science across their enterprise and with management becoming more data-driven it is an urgent requirement for analysts and managers to understand the key concept of data science. The data science concepts discussed in this book will help you make key decisions and solve the complex problems you will inevitably face in this new world. R Data Science Essentials will introduce you to various important concepts in the field of data science using R. We start by reading data from multiple sources, then move on to processing the data, extracting hidden patterns, building predictive and forecasting models, building a recommendation engine, and communicating to the user through stunning visualizations and dashboards. By the end of this book, you will have an understanding of some very important techniques in data science, be able to implement them using R, understand and interpret the outcomes, and know how they helps businesses make a decision.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
R Data Science Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 6. Time Series Forecasting

Forecasting is the process of predicting future events based on historic data. When forecasting is made on a time series data, such as events happening over a time interval, then it is called time series forecasting.

The time series forecasting can be implemented in multiple ways; it can be a simple moving average of the historic values or it can be built considering the factors such as the seasonality component and trend component. The seasonality component is one that has a cyclic behavior and repeats over a fixed time interval, whereas a trend component is generally short-lived and a gradual change that can move the value either upward or downward.

Time series forecasting has been in use across multiple industries for quite some time; it is commonly used for sales forecasting so that the raw material can be procured accordingly. The famous example for forecasting is weather forecasting, where based on the pattern in the past and recent changes, the future...