Chapter 1: An Overview of Time Series Analysis

Time series analysis is a technical domain with a very large choice of techniques that need to be carefully selected depending on the business problem you want to solve and the nature of your time series. In this chapter, we will discover the different families of time series and expose unique challenges you may encounter when dealing with this type of data.

By the end of this chapter, you will understand how to recognize what type of time series data you have and select the best approaches to perform your time series analysis (depending on the insights you want to uncover), and you will understand the use cases that Amazon Forecast, Amazon Lookout for Equipment, and Amazon Lookout for Metrics can help you solve, and which ones they are not suitable for.

You will also have a sound toolbox of time series techniques, Amazon Web Services (AWS) services, and open source Python packages that you can leverage in addition to the three managed services described in detail in this book. Data scientists will also find these tools to be great additions to their time series exploratory data analysis (EDA) toolbox.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:

• What is a time series dataset?
• Recognizing the different families of time series
• Adding context to time series data
• Learning about common time series challenges
• Selecting an analysis approach
• Typical time series use cases