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)

Basic data types


Python supports basic numeric data types such as int, long, and float, just like all major programming languages. None represents a null pointer in Python.

Strings are sequential data types in Python. Other sequential data types that are commonly used in Python are lists and tuples. The difference between a list and tuple is that the former is mutable while the latter is an immutable type. Therefore, the interpreter would throw an error if you try to modify a tuple. Let's dig a little deeper into lists and tuples.

List, tuple, and set

A list is a collection of elements. An element can be of any data type and a list can contain elements of different data types. A list has several important functions such as append, extend, insert, index, pop, and few others. The following table summarizes the functionality of these functions:

Function name

Functionality

append

Adds a new element to the end of the list.

extend

Adds new elements from an iterable. The members of the iterable element...