Introduction to Time Series, Sequences, and Predictions

Time series cut across various industries, sectors, and aspects of our lives. Finance, healthcare, social sciences, physics – you name it, time series data is there. It’s in sensors monitoring our environment, social media platforms tracking our digital footprint, online transactions recording our financial behavior, and many more avenues. This sequential data represents dynamic processes that evolve over time, and as we increasingly digitize our planet, the volume, and thereby the importance, of this data type is set to grow exponentially.

Time series follow a chronological order, capturing events as they occur in time. This temporal nature of time series bestows a unique quality that differentiates it from cross-sectional data. When we turn on the searchlight on time series data, we can observe attributes such as trends, seasonality, noise, cyclicity, and autocorrelations. These unique characteristics endow...