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

Mapping additional information

From the data model that we prepared earlier, we know that there are three key files that we have to map: Household Information, Weather, and Bank Holidays.

The informations_households.csv file contains metadata about the household. There are static features that are not dependent on time. For this, we just need to left merge informations_households.csv to the compact form based on LCLid, which is the time series identifier.

Best practice

While doing a pandas merge, one of the most common and unexpected outcomes is that the number of rows before and after the operation is not the same (even if you are doing a left merge). This typically happens because there are duplicates in the keys on which you are merging. As a best practice, you can use the validate parameter in the pandas merge, which takes in inputs such as one_to_one and many_to_one so that this check is done while merging and will throw an error if the assumption is not met. For more...