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

What is deep learning and why now?

In Chapter 5, Time Series Forecasting as Regression, we talked about machine learning and borrowed a definition from Arthur Samuel: “Machine Learning is a field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.” And we further saw how we can learn useful functions from data using machine learning. Deep learning is a subfield of this same field of study. The objective of deep learning is also to learn useful functions from data, but with a few specifications on how it does that.

Before we talk about what is special about deep learning, let’s answer another question first. Why are we talking about this subfield of machine learning as a separate topic? The answer to that lies in the unreasonable effectiveness of deep learning methods in countless applications. Deep learning has taken the world of machine learning by storm, overthrowing state-of-the-art systems across types of data such as...