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

Guidelines for choosing a metric

Throughout this chapter, we have come to understand that it is difficult to choose one forecast metric and apply it universally. There are advantages and disadvantages for each metric and being cognizant of these while selecting a metric is the only rational way to go about it.

Let’s summarize and note a few points we have seen through different experiments in the chapter:

  • Absolute error and squared error are both symmetric losses and are unbiased from the under- or over-forecasting perspective.
  • Squared error does have a tendency to magnify the outlying error because of the square term in it. Therefore, if we use a squared-error-based metric, we will be penalizing high errors much more than small errors.
  • RMSE is generally preferred over MSE because RMSE is on the same scale as the original input and therefore is a bit more interpretable.
  • Percent error and symmetric error are not symmetric in the complete sense and favor...