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 a forecast horizon

Although we generated forecasts earlier in this book, we never explicitly discussed forecast horizons. A forecast horizon is the number of time steps into the future we want to forecast at any point in time. For instance, if we want to forecast the next 24 hours for the electricity consumption dataset that we have been working with, the forecast horizon becomes 48 (because the data is half-hourly). In Chapter 5, Time Series Forecasting as Regression, where we generated baselines, we just predicted the entire test data at once. In such cases, the forecast horizon becomes equal to the length of the test data.

We never had to worry about this until now because, in the classical statistical methods of forecasting, this decision is decoupled from modeling. If we train a model, we can use that model to predict any future point without retraining. But with time series forecasting as regression, we have a constraint on the forecast horizon and it has its roots...