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

Choosing a validation strategy

Choosing the right validation strategy is one of the most important, but overlooked tasks in the machine learning workflow. A good validation setup will go a long way in all the different steps in the modeling process, such as feature engineering, feature selection, model selection, and hyperparameter tuning. Although there are no hard and fast rules in setting up a validation strategy, there are a few guidelines we can follow. Some of them are from experience (both mine and others) and some of them are from empirical and theoretical studies that have been published as research papers:

  • One guiding principle in the design is that we try to make the validation strategy replicate the real use of the model as much as possible. For instance, if the model is going to be used to predict the next 24 timesteps, we make the length of the validation split 24 timesteps. Of course, it’s not as simple as that, because other practical constraints such...