Book Image

Time Series Analysis on AWS

By : Michaël Hoarau
Book Image

Time Series Analysis on AWS

By: Michaël Hoarau

Overview of this book

Being a business analyst and data scientist, you have to use many algorithms and approaches to prepare, process, and build ML-based applications by leveraging time series data, but you face common problems, such as not knowing which algorithm to choose or how to combine and interpret them. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides numerous services to help you build applications fueled by artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. This book helps you get to grips with three AWS AI/ML-managed services to enable you to deliver your desired business outcomes. The book begins with Amazon Forecast, where you’ll discover how to use time series forecasting, leveraging sophisticated statistical and machine learning algorithms to deliver business outcomes accurately. You’ll then learn to use Amazon Lookout for Equipment to build multivariate time series anomaly detection models geared toward industrial equipment and understand how it provides valuable insights to reinforce teams focused on predictive maintenance and predictive quality use cases. In the last chapters, you’ll explore Amazon Lookout for Metrics, and automatically detect and diagnose outliers in your business and operational data. By the end of this AWS book, you’ll have understood how to use the three AWS AI services effectively to perform time series analysis.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Analyzing Time Series and Delivering Highly Accurate Forecasts with Amazon Forecast
9
Section 2: Detecting Abnormal Behavior in Multivariate Time Series with Amazon Lookout for Equipment
15
Section 3: Detecting Anomalies in Business Metrics with Amazon Lookout for Metrics

What kinds of problems can we solve with forecasting?

Forecasting is the science of predicting the future values of a time series as accurately as possible, given all the available information (including historical values of the very time series of interest, other related time series, and knowledge of any events that can impact your forecast). After reading the previous chapter, you might understand why it can also be considered an art!

Forecasting is a regular task required by many activities: most of the time, a forecast is a means to an end and not an actual objective in itself—except for financial planning, as mentioned in the introduction, although you could argue that financial planning is also a means to ensure good business decision-making. Here are a few examples of situations where you can leverage forecasting to achieve better business outcomes:

  • Forecasting future demand for a product to decide how much a plant will have to manufacture and by when. Failing...