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

Detecting and correcting for seasonality

A vast majority of real-world time series have seasonality such as retail sales, energy consumption, and so on. And generally, the presence or absence of seasonality comes as part of the domain knowledge. But when we are working with a time series dataset, the domain knowledge becomes slightly diluted. The majority of time series may exhibit seasonality, but that doesn’t mean every time series in the dataset is seasonal. For instance, within a retail dataset, there might be items that are seasonal and some items that are not. Therefore, when working with a time series dataset, being able to determine whether a particular time series is seasonal or not has some value.

Detecting seasonality

There are two popular ways to check for seasonality, apart from just eyeballing it: autocorrelation and fast Fourier transform. Either is equally capable of identifying the seasonality period automatically. For our discussion, we’ll cover...