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

Attention and Transformers for Time Series

In the previous chapter, we rolled up our sleeves and implemented a few deep learning (DL) systems for time series forecasting. We used the common building blocks we discussed in Chapter 12, Building Blocks of Deep Learning for Time Series, put them together in an encoder-decoder architecture, and trained them to produce the forecast we desired.

Now, let’s talk about another key concept in DL that has taken the field by storm over the past few years—attention. Attention has a long-standing history, which has culminated in it being one of the most sought-after tools in the DL toolkit. This chapter takes you on a journey to understand attention and transformer models from the ground up from a theoretical perspective and solidify that understanding with practical examples.

In this chapter, we will be covering these main topics:

  • What is attention?
  • Generalized attention model
  • Forecasting with sequence-to-sequence...