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

Summary

Although we learned about the basic blocks of DL in the previous chapter, we put all of that into action while we used those blocks in common modeling patterns using PyTorch.

We saw how standard sequence models such as RNN, LSTM, and GRU can be used for time series prediction, and then we moved on to another paradigm of models, called Seq2Seq models. Here, we talked about how we can mix and match encoders and decoders to get the model we want. Encoders and decoders can be arbitrarily complex. Although we looked at simple encoders and decoders, it is very much possible to have something like a combination of a convolution block and an LSTM block working together for the encoder. Last but not least, we talked about teacher forcing and how it can help models train and converge faster and also with some performance boost.

In the next chapter, we will be tackling a subject that has captured a lot of attention (pun intended) in the past few years: attention and transformers...