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

Neural Basis Expansion Analysis for Interpretable Time Series Forecasting with Exogenous Variables (N-BEATSx)

Olivares et al. proposed an extension of the N-BEATS model by making it compatible with exogenous variables. The overall structure is the same (with blocks, stacks, and residual connections) as N-BEATS (Figure 16.1), so we will only be focusing on the key differences and additions that the N-BEATSx model puts forward.

Reference check

The research paper by Olivares et al. (N-BEATSx) is cited in the References section as 4.

Handling exogenous variables

In N-BEATS, the input to a block was the lookback window, . But here, the input to a block is both the lookback window, , and the array of exogenous variables, . These exogenous variables can be of two types: time-varying and static. The static variables are encoded using a static feature encoder. This is nothing but a single-layer FC that encodes the static information into a dimension specified by the user. Now, the...