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 the scale of the time series

We used GroupNormlizer in TimeSeriesDataset to scale each household using its own mean and standard deviation. We did this because we wanted to make the target zero mean and unit variance so that the model does not waste effort trying to change its parameters to capture the scale of individual household consumption. Although this is a good strategy, we do have some information loss here. There may be patterns that are specific to households whose consumption is on the larger side and some other patterns that are specific to households that consume much less. But now, they are both lumped in together and the model tries to learn common patterns. In such a scenario, these unique patterns seem like noise to the model because there is no variable to explain those.

The bottom line is that there is information in the scale that we removed, and adding that information back would be beneficial. So, how do we add it back? Definitely not by including the...