Preface

Time-series are ubiquitous in industry and in research. Examples of time-series can be found in healthcare, energy, finance, user behavior, and website metrics to name just a few. Due to their prevalence, time-series modeling and forecasting is crucial and it's of great economic importance to be able to model them accurately.

While traditional and well-established approaches have been dominating econometrics research and – until recently – industry, machine learning for time-series is a relatively new research field that's only recently come out of its infancy.

In the last few years, a lot of progress has been made in machine learning on time-series; however, little of this has been made available in book form for a technical audience. Many books focus on traditional techniques, but hardly deal with recent machine learning techniques. This book aims to fill this gap and covers a lot of the latest progress, as evident in results from competition such as M4, or the current state-of-the-art in time-series classification.

If you read this book, you'll learn about established as well as cutting edge techniques and tools in Python for machine learning with time-series. Each chapter covers a different topic, such as anomaly detection, probabilistic models, drift detection and adaptive online learning, deep learning models, and reinforcement learning. Each of these topics comes with a review of the latest research and an introduction to popular libraries with examples.