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 9: Exploratory Data Analysis and Diagnosis

So far, we have covered techniques to extract data from various sources. This was covered in Chapter 2, Reading Time Series Data from Files, and Chapter 3, Reading Time Series Data from Databases. Chapter 6, Working with Date and Time in Python, and Chapter 7, Handling Missing Data, covered several techniques to help prepare, clean, and adjust data.

You will continue to explore additional techniques to better understand the time series process behind the data. Before modeling the data or doing any further analysis, an important step is to inspect the data at hand. More specifically, there are specific time series characteristics that you need to check for, such as stationarity, effects of trend and seasonality, and autocorrelation, to name a few. These characteristics that describe the time series process you are working with need to be combined with domain knowledge behind the process itself.

This chapter will build on what...