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

Temporal embedding

In Chapter 5, Time Series Forecasting as Regression, we briefly talked about temporal embedding as a process where we try to embed time into features that the ML model can leverage. If we think about time for a second, we will realize that there are two aspects of time that are important to us in the context of time series forecasting – passage of time and periodicity of time.

Let’s look at a few features that can help us capture these aspects in an ML model.

Calendar features

The first set of features that we can extract are features based on calendars. Although the strict definition of time series is a set of observations taken sequentially in time, more often than not, we will have the timestamps of these collected observations alongside the time series. We can utilize these timestamps and extract calendar features such as the month, quarter, day of the year, hour, minutes, and so on. These features capture the periodicity of time and help...