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

Global forecasting models – a paradigm shift

Traditionally, each time series was treated in isolation. Because of that, traditional forecasting has always looked at the history of a single time series alone in fitting a forecasting function. But recently, because of the ease of collecting data in today’s digital-first world, many companies have started collecting large amounts of time series from similar sources, or related time series.

For example, retailers such as Walmart collect data on sales of millions of products across thousands of stores. Companies such as Uber or Lyft collect the demand for rides from all the zones in a city. In the energy sector, energy consumption data is collected across all consumers. All these sets of time series have shared behavior and are hence called related time series.

We can consider that all the time series in a related time series come from separate data generating processes (DGPs), and thereby model them all separately...