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

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at the thickly populated and highly controversial area of forecast metrics. We started with a basic taxonomy of forecast measures to help you categorize and organize all the metrics in the field.

Then, we launched a few experiments through which we learned about the different properties of these metrics, slowly approaching a better understanding of what these metrics are measuring, but looking at synthetic time series experiments, we learned how MAPE and sMAPE favor under- and over-forecasting, respectively.

We also analyzed the rank correlations between these metrics on real data to see how similar the different metrics are and finally, rounded off by laying out a few guidelines that can help you pick a forecasting metric for your problem.

In the next chapter, we will look at cross-validation strategies for time series.