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)

Chapter 7: Handling Missing Data

As a data scientist, data analyst, or business analyst, you have probably discovered that obtaining a perfect clean dataset is too optimistic. What is more common, though, is that the data you are working with suffers from flaws such as missing values, erroneous data, duplicate records, insufficient data, or the presence of outliers in the data.

Time series data is no different, and before plugging the data into any analysis or modeling workflow, you must investigate the data first. It is vital to understand the business context around the time series data to detect and identify these problems successfully. For example, if you work with stock data, the context is very different from COVID data or sensor data.

Having that intuition or domain knowledge will allow you to anticipate what to expect and what is considered acceptable when analyzing the data. Always try to understand the business context around the data. For example, why is the data...