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

Handling missing data

While dealing with large datasets in the wild, you are bound to encounter missing data. If it is not part of the time series, it may be part of the additional information you collect and map. Before we jump the gun and fill it with a mean value or drop those rows, let’s think about a few aspects:

  • The first consideration should be whether the missing data we are worried about is missing or not. For that, we need to think about the Data Generating Process (DGP) (the process that is generating the time series). As an example, let’s look at sales at a local supermarket. You have been given the point-of-sale (POS) transactions for the last 2 years and you are processing the data into a time series. While analyzing the data, you found that there are a few products where there aren’t any transactions for a few days. Now, what you need to think about is whether the missing data is missing or whether there is some information that this missingness...