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

Experimental study of the error measures

As we discussed earlier, there are a lot of metrics for forecasting that people have come up with over the years. Although there are many different formulations of these metrics, there can be similarities in what they are measuring. Therefore, if we are going to choose a primary and secondary metric while modeling, we should pick some metrics that are diverse and measure different aspects of the forecast.

Through this experiment, we are going to try and figure out which of these metrics are similar to each other. We are going to use the subset of the London Smart Meters dataset we have been using all through the book and generate some forecasts for each household. I have chosen to do this exercise with the darts library because I wanted multi-step forecasting. I’ve used five different forecasting methods – seasonal naïve, exponential smoothing, Theta, FFT, and LightGBM (local) – and generated forecasts. On top of...