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

Recursive strategy

The recursive strategy is the oldest, most intuitive, and most popular technique to generate multi-step forecasts. To understand a strategy, there are two major regimes we have to understand:

  • How is the training of the models done?
  • How are the trained models used to generate forecasts?

Let’s take the help of a diagram to understand the recursive strategy:

Figure 17.2 – Recursive strategy for multi-step forecasting

Let’s discuss these regimes in detail.

Training regime

The recursive strategy involves training a single model to perform a one-step-ahead forecast. We can see in Figure 17.1 that we use the window function, , to draw a window from and train the model to predict . And during training, a loss function (which measures the divergence between the output of the model, , and the actual value, ) is used to optimize the parameters of the model.

Forecasting regime

We have trained a model...