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

Balancing the sampling procedure

We saw a few strategies for improving a global deep learning model by adding new types of features. Now, let’s look at a different aspect that is relevant in a global modeling context. In an earlier section, when we were talking about global deep learning models, we talked about how the process by which we sample a window of sequence to feed to our model can be thought of as a two-step process:

  1. Sampling a time series out of a set of time series
  2. Sampling a window out of that time series

Let’s use an analogy to make the concept clearer. Imagine we have a large bowl that we have filled with balls. Each ball in the bowl represents a time series in the dataset (a household in our dataset). Now, each ball, , has chits of paper representing all the different windows of samples we can draw from it.

In the batch sampling we use by default, we open all the balls and dump all the chits into the bowl and discard the balls....