Book Image

Time Series Analysis with Python Cookbook

By : Tarek A. Atwan
Book Image

Time Series Analysis with Python Cookbook

By: Tarek A. Atwan

Overview of this book

Time series data is everywhere, available at a high frequency and volume. It is complex and can contain noise, irregularities, and multiple patterns, making it crucial to be well-versed with the techniques covered in this book for data preparation, analysis, and forecasting. This book covers practical techniques for working with time series data, starting with ingesting time series data from various sources and formats, whether in private cloud storage, relational databases, non-relational databases, or specialized time series databases such as InfluxDB. Next, you’ll learn strategies for handling missing data, dealing with time zones and custom business days, and detecting anomalies using intuitive statistical methods, followed by more advanced unsupervised ML models. The book will also explore forecasting using classical statistical models such as Holt-Winters, SARIMA, and VAR. The recipes will present practical techniques for handling non-stationary data, using power transforms, ACF and PACF plots, and decomposing time series data with multiple seasonal patterns. Later, you’ll work with ML and DL models using TensorFlow and PyTorch. Finally, you’ll learn how to evaluate, compare, optimize models, and more using the recipes covered in the book.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Providing a format argument to DateTime

When working with datasets extracted from different data sources, you may encounter date columns stored in string format, whether from files or databases. In the previous recipe, Working with DatetimeIndex, you explored the pandas.to_datetime() function that can parse various date formats with minimal input. However, you will want more granular control to ensure that the date is parsed correctly. For example, you will now be introduced to the strptime and strftime methods and see how you can specify formatting in pandas.to_datetime() to handle different date formats.

In this recipe, you will learn how to parse strings that represent dates to a datetime or date object (an instance of the class datetime.datetime or datetime.date).

How to do it…

Python's datetime module contains the strptime() method to create datetime or date from a string that contains a date. You will first explore how you can do this in Python and then...