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

Understanding the encoder-decoder paradigm

In Chapter 5, Time Series Forecasting as Regression, we saw that machine learning is all about learning a function that maps our inputs to the desired output:

Adapting this to time series forecasting (considering univariate time series forecasting to keep it simple), we can rewrite it as follows:

Here, t is the current timestep and N is the total amount of history available at time t.

Deep learning, like any other machine learning approach, is tasked with learning this function, which maps history to the future. In Chapter 11, Introduction to Deep Learning, we saw how deep learning learns good features using representation learning and then uses the learned features to carry out the task at hand. This understanding can be further refined to the time series perspective by using the encoder-decoder paradigm.

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