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

Using time-varying information

The GFM(ML) used all the available features. So obviously, that model had access to a lot more information than the GFM(DL) we have built till now. The GFM(DL) we just built only takes in the history and nothing else. Let’s change that by including time-varying information. We will just use time-varying real features this time because dealing with categorical features is a topic I want to leave for the next section.

We initialize the training dataset the same way as before, but we add time_varying_known_reals=feat_config.time_varying_known_reals to the initialization parameters. Now that we have all the datasets created, let’s move on to setting up the model.

To set up the model, we need to understand one concept. We are now using the history of the target and time-varying known features. In Figure 15.3, we saw how TimeSeriesDataset arranges the different kinds of variables in PyTorch tensors. In the previous section, we used only...