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

Sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models

We talked in detail about the sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) architecture and the encoder-decoder paradigm in Chapter 12, Building Blocks of Deep Learning for Time Series. Just to refresh your memory, the Seq2Seq model is a kind of an encoder-decoder model by which an encoder encodes the sequence into a latent representation, and then the decoder steps in to carry out the task at hand using this latent representation. This setup is inherently more flexible because of the separation between the encoder (which does the representation learning) and the decoder, which uses the representation for predictions. One of the biggest advantages of this approach, from a time series forecasting perspective, is that the restriction of single step ahead is taken out. Under this modeling pattern, we can extend the forecast to any forecast horizon we want.

In this section, let’s put together a few encoder-decoder models and test out our single-step-ahead...