Automatic Time Series Forecasting

In many business sectors, forecasting is crucial for making informed and effective business decisions.
Utilizing adaptive, versatile, and cutting-edge alternatives from the machine learning (ML) sector is
crucial in the digital age and during times of unique situations like the present Coronavirus epidemic.
Machine learning enables the modeling of specific relationships, the implementation and execution of
planning procedures across the organization, and promotes a significant decrease in mistake rates.

Automatic Time Series or Auto TS forecasting is a Python-based automated machine learning library that
was created to automate time series forecasting. This library may be used for any time series forecasting
assignment, such as predicting stock prices for the next n days.

In this article, I’ll walk you through a Python lesson on the AutoTS package.

You will learn about automated forecasting, AutoTS, and some of its features. We will close this article by
working on a dataset and using the AutoTS package to perform automated time series forecasting.

What is automated forecasting?

The mathematical concept of a time series is used to represent the temporal evolution of observations
or variables that have been measured. Time series forecasting, is the process of predicting future values
of a measurable variable based on the current and historical time series. The amount of data is a key
consideration and one of the common mistakes in most ML techniques is using the wrong amount.
Training and test data are separated from the accessible data. The training data for time series
forecasting are typically the earliest accessible data, while the test data are the most recent data to
model a forecast. From the training data, a model picks up traits like seasonality, patterns, and holidays.
The model is then tested using available test data to verify correctness. The appropriate parameter
adjustments can be made to maximize accuracy.

A time series is characterized by several mathematical models, each of which uses a particular set of
parameters. The so-called ARIMA model is one example of a classical model. Indicated by the three
parameters p, d, and q, ARIMA(p, d, q) stands for Auto-Regressive (AR) Integrated (I) Moving Average
(MA).

Various techniques, such as the computation and display of the Autocorrelation and Partial
Autocorrelation Functions (ACF/PACF), must be used to establish the parameters in traditional
forecastinAutoTS is a Python package that is open-source and mostly used to automate time series
forecasting. With just one line of code, it will automatically train various time series models, allowing us
to select the most appropriate one for our problem statement. AutoTS is a Python time series tool
created for the purpose of quickly implementing accurate predictions at scale.