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

Understanding the time series dataset

This is the key first step in any new dataset you come across, even before Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), which we will be covering in Chapter 3, Analyzing and Visualizing Time Series Data. Understanding where the data is coming from, the data generating process behind it, and the source domain is essential to having a good understanding of the dataset.

London Data Store, a free and open data-sharing portal, provided this dataset, which was collected and enriched by Jean-Michel D and uploaded on Kaggle.

The dataset contains energy consumption readings for a sample of 5,567 London households that took part in the UK Power Networks-led Low Carbon London project between November 2011 and February 2014. Readings were taken at half-hourly intervals. Some metadata about the households is also available as part of the dataset. Let’s look at what metadata is available as part of the dataset:

  • CACI UK segmented the UK’s population...