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

Validation strategies for datasets with multiple time series

All the strategies we have seen till now are perfectly valid for datasets with multiple time series, such as the London Smart Meters dataset we have been working with in this book. The insights we discussed in the last section are also valid. The implementation of such strategies can be slightly tricky because the scikit learn classes we discussed work for single time series. Those implementations assume that we have a single time series, sorted according to the temporal order. If there are multiple time series, the splits will be haphazard and messy.

There are a couple of options we can adopt for datasets with multiple time series:

  • We can loop over the different time series and use the methods we discussed to do the train-validation split, and then concatenate the resulting sets across all the time series. But, that is not going to be so efficient.
  • We can write some code and design the validation strategies...