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

Taxonomy of forecast error measures

Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually improvement.

–H. James Harrington

Traditionally, in regression problems, we have very few, general loss functions such as the mean squared error or the mean absolute error, but when you step into the world of time series forecasting, you will be hit with a myriad of different metrics.

Important note

Since the focus of the book is on point predictions (and not probabilistic predictions), we will stick to reviewing point forecast metrics.

There are a few key factors that distinguish the metrics in time series forecasting:

  • Temporal relevance: The temporal aspect of the prediction we make is an essential aspect of a forecasting paradigm. Metrics such as forecast bias and the tracking signal take this aspect into account.
  • Aggregate metrics: In most business use cases, we would not be forecasting a single time series, but rather a set of time series, related...