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

Forecasting with Transformers

For some continuity, we will continue with the same household we were forecasting with RNNs and RNNs with attention.

Notebook alert

To follow along with the complete code, use the notebook named 03-Transformers.ipynb in the Chapter14 folder and the code in the src folder.

Although we learned about the vanilla Transformer as a model with an encoder-decoder architecture, it was really designed for language translation tasks. In language translation, the source sequence and target sequence are quite different, and therefore the encoder-decoder architecture made sense. But soon after, researchers figured out that using the decoder part of the Transformer alone does well. It is called a decoder-only Transformer in literature. The naming is a bit confusing because if you think about it, the decoder is different from the encoder in two things—masked self-attention and encoder-decoder attention. So, in a decoder-only Transformer, how do we have...