Book Image

Hands-On Time Series Analysis with R

By : Rami Krispin
Book Image

Hands-On Time Series Analysis with R

By: Rami Krispin

Overview of this book

Time-series analysis is the art of extracting meaningful insights from, and revealing patterns in, time-series data using statistical and data visualization approaches. These insights and patterns can then be utilized to explore past events and forecast future values in the series. This book explores the basics of time-series analysis with R and lays the foundation you need to build forecasting models. You will learn how to preprocess raw time-series data and clean and manipulate data with packages such as stats, lubridate, xts, and zoo. You will analyze data using both descriptive statistics and rich data visualization tools in R including the TSstudio, plotly, and ggplot2 packages. The book then delves into traditional forecasting models such as time-series linear regression, exponential smoothing (Holt, Holt-Winter, and more) and Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models with the stats and forecast packages. You'll also work on advanced time-series regression models with machine learning algorithms such as random forest and Gradient Boosting Machine using the h2o package. By the end of this book, you will have developed the skills necessary for exploring your data, identifying patterns, and building a forecasting model using various traditional and machine learning methods.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Forecasting with exponential smoothing

Among the traditional time series forecasting models, the exponential smoothing functions are one of the most popular forecasting approaches. This approach, conceptually, is close to the moving average approach we introduced previously, as both are based on forecasting the future values of the series by averaging the past observations of the series. The main distinction between the exponential smoothing and the moving average approaches is that the first is averaging all series observations, as opposed to a subset of m observations by the latter.

Furthermore, the advance exponential smoothing functions can handle series with a trend and seasonal components. In this section, we will focus on the main exponential smoothing forecasting models:

  • Simple exponential smoothing model
  • Holt model
  • Holt-Winters model
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