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

Stacking or blending

We started this chapter by talking about machine learning algorithms, which learn a function from a set of inputs and outputs. While using those machine learning algorithms, we learned about the functions that forecast our time series, which we'll call base forecasts now. Why not use the same machine learning paradigm to learn this new function, , that we are trying to learn as well?

This is exactly what we do in stacking (often called stacked generalization), where we train another learning algorithm on the predictions of some base learners to combine these predictions. This second-level model is often called a stacked model or a meta model. And typically, this meta model performs equal to or better than the base learners.

Although the idea originated with Wolpert in 1992, Leo Breiman formalized this idea in the way it is used now in his 1996 paper titled Stacked Regressions. And in 2007, Mark J. Van der Laan et al. established the theoretical underpinnings...