Book Image

Practical Time Series Analysis

By : Avishek Pal, PKS Prakash
Book Image

Practical Time Series Analysis

By: Avishek Pal, PKS Prakash

Overview of this book

Time Series Analysis allows us to analyze data which is generated over a period of time and has sequential interdependencies between the observations. This book describes special mathematical tricks and techniques which are geared towards exploring the internal structures of time series data and generating powerful descriptive and predictive insights. Also, the book is full of real-life examples of time series and their analyses using cutting-edge solutions developed in Python. The book starts with descriptive analysis to create insightful visualizations of internal structures such as trend, seasonality, and autocorrelation. Next, the statistical methods of dealing with autocorrelation and non-stationary time series are described. This is followed by exponential smoothing to produce meaningful insights from noisy time series data. At this point, we shift focus towards predictive analysis and introduce autoregressive models such as ARMA and ARIMA for time series forecasting. Later, powerful deep learning methods are presented, to develop accurate forecasting models for complex time series, and under the availability of little domain knowledge. All the topics are illustrated with real-life problem scenarios and their solutions by best-practice implementations in Python. The book concludes with the Appendix, with a brief discussion of programming and solving data science problems using Python.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Installation


Setting up Python on your computer would require installation of three components-the interpreter, an integrated development environment (IDE), and packages to support application development. Thankfully, we do not have to install these separately. There are software packages that bundle all three and a single installation makes the most available for use.

Python installers

There are two widely used options of installers that bundle the interpreter, an IDE, and useful Python packages:

  • Option 1: Installers that bundle all three components are available for download from https://www.python.org. This website hosts the installers for several different versions of the language. The latest versions, at the time of writing this book, are Python 3.2.6 and Python 2.7.13. The installers come with a basic IDE that is a good place to write some code and get a feel of how the language works. Several packages such as the ones on file handling, memory management, mathematical computations, and...