Time Series — From Analyzing the Past to Predicting the Future | by Farzad Nobar | Oct, 2024

How to learn from the past with time series.

If you are interested in making forecasts about a future outcome, time series is the tool for it. Time series data is a collection of observations recorded at specific intervals, such as an hourly weather report, or a daily inventory and sales report. Time series provide us with tools to understand historical data and use them to forecast the future with more certainty. For example, I am personally grateful to all those scientists who created the weather forecast app through the study of time series and businesses such as Amazon that rely on their sales forecast to better place inventory so that I can receive my Amazon order as soon as possible!

There admittedly are a number of time series tutorials available online but I still decided to write this post because of the following contributions:

1. Build Foundation: Instead of assuming reader’s familiarity with time series, we will go deeper into introducing the foundational concepts related to the time series to better understand the topic and follow along.
2. Build Breadth: Once readers are familiar with the foundational knowledge necessary to appreciate time series, we then introduce 10 different time series forecasting methods that can be used…