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

The need for specialized architectures

Inductive bias, or learning bias, refers to a set of assumptions a learning algorithm makes to generalize the function it learns on training data to unseen data. Deep learning is thought to be a completely data-driven approach where the feature engineering and final task are learned end-to-end, thus avoiding the inductive bias that the modelers bake in while designing the features. But that view is not entirely correct. These inductive biases, which used to be put in through the features, now make their way through the design of architecture. Every DL architecture has its own inductive biases, which is why some types of models perform better on some types of data. For instance, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) works well on images, but not as much on sequences because the spatial inductive bias and translational equivariance that the CNN brings to the table are most effective on images.

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