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

Model validation

In Chapter 18, Evaluating Forecasts – Forecast Metrics, we learned about different forecast metrics that can be used to measure the quality of a forecast. One of the main uses for this is to measure how well our forecast is doing on test data (new and unseen data), but this comes after we train a model, tweak it, and tinker with it until we are happy with it. How do we know whether a model we are training or tweaking is good enough?

Model validation is the process of evaluating a trained model using data to assess how good the model is. We use the metrics we learned about in Chapter 18, Evaluating Forecasts – Forecast Metrics, to calculate the goodness of the forecast. But, there is one question we haven’t answered. Which part of the data do we use to evaluate? In a standard machine learning setup (classification or regression), we randomly sample a portion of the training data and call it validation data, and it is based on this data that all...