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

Setting up a test harness

Before we start forecasting and setting up baselines, we need to set up a test harness. In software testing, a test harness is a collection of code and the inputs that have been configured to test a program under various situations. In terms of machine learning, a test harness is a set of code and data that can be used to evaluate algorithms. It is important to set up a test harness so that we can evaluate all future algorithms in a standard and quick way.

The first thing we need is holdout (test) and validation datasets.

Creating holdout (test) and validation datasets

As a standard practice, in machine learning, we set aside two parts of the dataset, name them validation data and test data, and don’t use them at all to train the model. The validation data is used in the modeling process to assess the quality of the model. To select between different model classes, tune the hyperparameters, perform feature selection, and so on, we need a dataset...