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

Investigating the error measures

It’s not enough to know the different metrics since we also need to understand how these work, what are they good for, and what are they not good for. We can start with the basic errors and work our way up because understanding the properties of basic errors such as absolute error, squared error, percent error, and symmetric error will help us understand the others as well because most of the other metrics are derivatives of these primary errors; either aggregating them or using relative benchmarks.

Let’s do this investigation using a few experiments and understand them through the results.

Notebook alert

The notebook for running these experiments on your own is 01-Loss Curves and Symmetry.ipynb in the Chapter18 folder.

Loss curves and complementarity

All these base errors depend on two factors – forecasts and actual observations. We can examine the behavior of these several metrics if we fix one and alter the other...