Book Image

Machine Learning for Time-Series with Python

By : Ben Auffarth
Book Image

Machine Learning for Time-Series with Python

By: Ben Auffarth

Overview of this book

The Python time-series ecosystem is huge and often quite hard to get a good grasp on, especially for time-series since there are so many new libraries and new models. This book aims to deepen your understanding of time series by providing a comprehensive overview of popular Python time-series packages and help you build better predictive systems. Machine Learning for Time-Series with Python starts by re-introducing the basics of time series and then builds your understanding of traditional autoregressive models as well as modern non-parametric models. By observing practical examples and the theory behind them, you will become confident with loading time-series datasets from any source, deep learning models like recurrent neural networks and causal convolutional network models, and gradient boosting with feature engineering. This book will also guide you in matching the right model to the right problem by explaining the theory behind several useful models. You’ll also have a look at real-world case studies covering weather, traffic, biking, and stock market data. By the end of this book, you should feel at home with effectively analyzing and applying machine learning methods to time-series.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
13
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14
Index

What Is a Time-Series?

Since this is a book about time-series data, we should start with a clarification of what we are talking about. In this section, we'll introduce time-series and their characteristics, and we'll go through different kinds of problems and types of analyses relevant to machine learning and statistics.

Many disciplines, such as finance, public administration, energy, retail, and healthcare, are dominated by time-series data. Large areas of micro- and macro-economics rely on applied statistics with an emphasis on time-series analyses and modeling. The following are examples of time-series data:

  • Daily closing values of a stock index
  • Number of weekly infections of a disease
  • Weekly series of train accidents
  • Rainfall per day
  • Sensor data such as temperature measurements per hour
  • Population growth per year
  • Quarterly earnings of a company over a number of years

This is only to name but a few. Any data...