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

Recurrent neural networks

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a family of neural networks specifically designed to handle sequential data. They were first proposed by Rumelhart et al. (1986) in their seminal work, Learning Representations by Back-Propagating Errors. The work borrows ideas such as parameter sharing and recurrence from previous work in statistics and machine learning to come up with a neural network architecture that helps overcome many of the disadvantages FFNs have when processing sequential data.

Parameter sharing is when we use the same set of parameters for different parts of the model. Apart from a regularization effect (restricting the model to using the same set of weights for multiple tasks, which regularizes the model by constraining the search space while optimizing the model), parameter sharing enables us to extend and apply the model to examples of different forms. RNNs can scale to much longer sequences because of this. In an FFN, each timestep (each...