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

Avoiding data leakage

Data leakage occurs when the model is trained with some information that would not be available at the time of prediction. Typically, this leads to high performance in the training set, but very poor performance in unseen data. There are two types of data leakage:

  • Target leakage is when the information about the target (that we are trying to predict) leaks into some of the features in the model, leading to an overreliance of the model on those features, ultimately leading to poor generalization. This includes features that use the target in any way.
  • Train-test contamination is when there is some information leaking between the train and test datasets. This can happen because of careless handling and splitting of data. But it can also happen in more subtle ways, such as scaling the dataset before splitting the train and test sets.

When we are working with time series forecasting problems, the biggest and most common mistake that we can make...