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

Cross-validation strategies

Cross-validation is one of the most important tools when evaluating standard regression and classification methods. This is because of two reasons:

  • A simple holdout approach doesn’t use all the data available and in cases where data is scarce, cross-validation makes the best use of the available data.
  • Theoretically, the time series we have observed is one realization of a stochastic process, and so the acquired error measure of the data is also a stochastic variable. Therefore, it is essential to sample multiple error estimates to get an idea about the distribution of the stochastic variable. Intuitively, we can think of this as a “lack of reliability” on the error measure derived from a single slice of data.

The most common strategy that is used in standard machine learning is called k-fold cross-validation. Under this strategy, we randomly shuffle and partition the training data into k equal parts. Now, the whole...