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

Components of a time series

Before we start analyzing and visualizing time series, we need to understand the structure of a time series. Any time series can contain some or all of the following components:

  • Trend
  • Seasonal
  • Cyclical
  • Irregular

These components can be mixed in different ways, but two very commonly assumed ways are additive (Y = Trend + Seasonal + Cyclical + Irregular) and multiplicative (Y = Trend * Seasonal * Cyclical * Irregular).

The trend component

The trend is a long-term change in the mean of a time series. It is the smooth and steady movement of a time series in a particular direction. When the time series moves upward, we say there is an upward or increasing trend, while when it moves downward, we say there is a downward or decreasing trend. At the time of writing, if we think about the revenue of Tesla over the years, as shown in the following figure, we can see that it has been increasing consistently for the last few years:

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