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

Evaluating Forecasts – Forecast Metrics

We started getting into the nuances of forecasting in the previous chapter where we saw how to generate multi-step forecasts. While that covers one of the aspects, there is another aspect of forecasting that is as important as it is confusing – how to evaluate forecasts.

In the real world, we generate forecasts to enable some downstream processes to plan better and take relevant actions. For instance, the operations manager at a bike rental company should decide how many bikes he should make available at the metro station the next day at 4 p.m. However, instead of using the forecasts blindly, he may want to know which forecasts he should trust and which ones he shouldn’t. This can only be done by measuring how good a forecast is.

We have been using a few metrics throughout the book and it is now time to get down into the details to understand those metrics, when to use them, and when to not use some metrics. We will...