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

Informer

Recently, Transformer models have shown superior performance in capturing long-term patterns than standard RNNs. One of the major factors of that is the fact that self-attention, which powers Transformers, can reduce the length that the relevant sequence information has to be held on to before it can be used for prediction. In other words, in an RNN, if the timestep 12 steps before holds important information, that information has to be stored in the RNN through 12 updates before it can be used for prediction. But with self-attention in Transformers, the model is free to create a shortcut between lag 12 and the current step directly because of the lack of recurrence in the structure.

But the same self-attention is also the reason why we can’t scale vanilla Transformers to long sequences. In the previous section, we discussed how long-term forecasting is a challenge because of two reasons: the expressiveness required to truly capture the variation and computational...