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

Autoformer

Autoformer is another model that is designed for long-term forecasting. While the Informer model focuses on making the attention computation more efficient, Autoformer invents a new kind of attention and couples it with aspects from time series decomposition.

The architecture of the Autoformer model

Autoformer has a lot of similarities with the Informer model, so much so that it can be thought of as an extension of the Informer model. Uniform Input Representation and the generative-style decoder have been reused in Autoformer. But instead of ProbSparse attention, Autoformer has an AutoCorrelation mechanism. And instead of attention distillation, Autoformer has a time series decomposition-inspired encoder-decoder setup.

Reference check

The research paper by Wu et al. on Autoformer is cited in the References section as 9.

Let’s look at the time series decomposition architecture first.

Decomposition architecture

We saw this idea of decomposition...