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

Feed-forward networks

Feed-forward networks (FFNs) or fully connected networks are the most basic architecture a neural network can take. We discussed perceptrons in Chapter 11, Introduction to Deep Learning. If we stack multiple perceptrons (both linear units and non-linear activations) and create a network of such units, we get what we call an FFN. The following diagram will help us understand this:

Figure 12.2 – Feed-forward network

An FFN takes a fixed-size input vector and passes it through a series of computational layers leading up to the desired output. This architecture is called feed-forward because the information is fed forward through the network. This is also called a fully connected network because every unit in a layer is connected to every unit in the previous layer and every unit in the next layer.

The first layer is called the input layer, and this is equal to the dimension of the input. The last layer is called the output layer...