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

Time series forecasting as regression

A time series, as we saw in Chapter 1, Introducing Time Series, is a set of observations taken sequentially in time. And typically, time series forecasting is about trying to predict what these observations will be in the future. Given a sequence of observations of arbitrary length of history, we predict the future to an arbitrary horizon.

We saw that regression, or machine learning to predict a continuous variable, works on a dataset of examples, and each example is a set of input features and targets. We can see that regression, which is tasked with predicting a single output provided with a set of inputs, is fundamentally incompatible with forecasting, where we are given a set of historical values and asked to predict the future values. This fundamental incompatibility between the time series and machine learning regression paradigms is why we cannot use regression for time series forecasting directly.

Moreover, time series forecasting...