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)

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the use of a weighted average of past observations for forecast time series data. We started with a simplistic and naive forecasting approach with the moving average function. Although this function is limited to short-term forecasts and can only handle time series with no seasonal and trend components, it provides context for exponential smoothing functions. The exponential smoothing family of forecasting models is based on the use of different smoothing parameters, that is , , and , for modeling the main components of time series data—level, trend, and seasonal, respectively. The main advantages of exponential smoothing functions are their simplicity, they're cheap for computing, and their modularity, which allows them to handle different types of time series data, such as linear and exponential trends and seasonal components...