Book Image

Modern Time Series Forecasting with Python

By : Manu Joseph
5 (1)
Book Image

Modern Time Series Forecasting with Python

5 (1)
By: Manu Joseph

Overview of this book

We live in a serendipitous era where the explosion in the quantum of data collected and a renewed interest in data-driven techniques such as machine learning (ML), has changed the landscape of analytics, and with it, time series forecasting. This book, filled with industry-tested tips and tricks, takes you beyond commonly used classical statistical methods such as ARIMA and introduces to you the latest techniques from the world of ML. This is a comprehensive guide to analyzing, visualizing, and creating state-of-the-art forecasting systems, complete with common topics such as ML and deep learning (DL) as well as rarely touched-upon topics such as global forecasting models, cross-validation strategies, and forecast metrics. You’ll begin by exploring the basics of data handling, data visualization, and classical statistical methods before moving on to ML and DL models for time series forecasting. This book takes you on a hands-on journey in which you’ll develop state-of-the-art ML (linear regression to gradient-boosted trees) and DL (feed-forward neural networks, LSTMs, and transformers) models on a real-world dataset along with exploring practical topics such as interpretability. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build world-class time series forecasting systems and tackle problems in the real world.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Getting Familiar with Time Series
6
Part 2 – Machine Learning for Time Series
13
Part 3 – Deep Learning for Time Series
20
Part 4 – Mechanics of Forecasting

Combining forecasts

We have generated forecasts by using many techniques – some univariate, some machine learning, and so on. But at the end of the day, we would need a single forecast, and that means choosing a forecast or combining a variety. The most straightforward option is to choose the algorithm that does the best in the validation dataset, which in our case is LightGBM. We can think of this selection as another function that takes the forecasts that we generated as inputs and combines them into a final forecast. Mathematically, this can be represented as follows:

Here, is the function that combines N forecasts. We can use the function to choose the best-performing model in the validation dataset. However, this function can be as complex as it wants to be, and choosing the right function while balancing bias and variance is a must.

Notebook alert

To follow along with the code, use the 01-Forecast Combinations.ipynb notebook in the chapter09...