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

Feature engineering

Feature engineering, as the name suggests, is the process of engineering features from the data, mostly using domain knowledge, to make the learning process smoother and more efficient. In a typical ML setting, engineering good features is essential to get good performance from any ML model. Feature engineering is a highly subjective part of ML where each problem at hand has a different path – one that is hand-crafted to that problem.

When we are casting a time series problem as a regression problem, there are a few standard techniques that we can apply. This is a key step in the process because how well an ML model acquires an understanding of time is dependent on how well we engineer features to capture time. The baseline methods we covered in Chapter 4, Setting a Strong Baseline Forecast, are the methods that are created for the specific use case of time series forecasting and because of that, the temporal aspect of the problem is built into those...