AutoMLSearch for time series problems

In this guide, we’ll show how you can use EvalML to perform an automated search of machine learning pipelines for time series problems. Time series support is still being actively developed in EvalML so expect this page to improve over time.

But first, what is a time series?

A time series is a series of measurements taken at different moments in time (Wikipedia). The main difference between a time series dataset and a normal dataset is that the rows of a time series dataset are ordered with time. This relationship between the rows does not exist in non-time series datasets. In a non-time-series dataset, you can shuffle the rows and the dataset still has the same meaning. If you shuffle the rows of a time series dataset, the relationship between the rows is completely different!

What does AutoMLSearch for time series do?

In a machine learning setting, we are usually interested in using past values of the time series to predict future values. That is what EvalML’s time series functionality is built to do.

Loading the data

In this guide, we work with daily minimum temperature recordings from Melbourne, Austrailia from the beginning of 1981 to end of 1990.

We start by loading the temperature data into two splits. The first split will be a training split consisting of data from 1981 to end of 1989. This is the data we’ll use to find the best pipeline with AutoML. The second split will be a testing split consisting of data from 1990. This is the split we’ll use to evaluate how well our pipeline generalizes on unseen data.

from evalml.demos import load_weather
X, y = load_weather()

             Number of Features
Categorical                   1

Number of training examples: 3650
Targets
10.0    1.40%
11.0    1.40%
13.0    1.32%
12.5    1.21%
10.5    1.21%
        ...
0.2     0.03%
24.0    0.03%
25.2    0.03%
22.7    0.03%
21.6    0.03%
Name: Temp, Length: 229, dtype: object

train_dates, test_dates = X.Date < "1990-01-01", X.Date >= "1990-01-01"
X_train, y_train = X.ww.loc[train_dates], y.ww.loc[train_dates]
X_test, y_test =  X.ww.loc[test_dates], y.ww.loc[test_dates]

Visualizing the training set

import plotly.graph_objects as go

data = [
    go.Scatter(
        x=X_train["Date"],
        y=y_train,
        mode="lines+markers",
        name="Temperature (C)",
        line=dict(color="#1f77b4"),
    )
]
# Let plotly pick the best date format.
layout = go.Layout(
    title={"text": "Min Daily Temperature, Melbourne 1980-1989"},
    xaxis={"title": "Time"},
    yaxis={"title": "Temperature (C)"},
)

go.Figure(data=data, layout=layout)