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 static/meta information

There are some features such as the Acorn group, whether dynamic pricing is enabled, and so on, that are specific to a household, which will help the model learn patterns specific to these groups. Naturally, including that information makes intuitive sense. But as we discussed in Chapter 10, Global Forecasting Models, categorical features do not play well with machine learning models because they aren’t numerical. In that chapter, we discussed a few ways of encoding categorical features into numerical representations. We can use any of those in a deep learning model as well. But there is one way of handling categorical features that is unique to deep learning models – embedding vectors.

One-hot encoding and why it is not ideal

One of the ways of converting categorical features to numerical representation is one-hot encoding. It encodes the categorical features in a higher dimension, placing the categorical values equally distant in...