Packt Publishing Time Series with PyTorch: Modern Deep Learning Toolkit for Real-World Forecasting Challenges

Time series is far more than fit-predict forecasting. Real mastery comes from intuition and is built through experimentation. Walk the full range with two practitioners: forecasting, conformal prediction, transfer learning, and beyond. Key Features Grasp core concepts through clear explanations that build genuine understanding rather than surface familiarity Work with realistic datasets and develop the judgement to choose the right approach for your problem Progress from neural network fundamentals to advanced techniques across a full range of time series challenges. Book Description Neural networks are powerful tools for time-series forecasting, but applying them effectively requires both practical experience and a clear understanding of architectures, training strategies, and evaluation methods. This book brings these ideas together in a structured and practical way. Starting with PyTorch fundamentals, you will build neural networks from scratch and progress through recurrent networks, attention mechanisms, and transformers before exploring forecasting architectures such as N-BEATS, N-HiTS, and the Temporal Fusion Transformer. Along the way, you will learn robust hyperparameter tuning, conformal prediction for uncertainty estimation, and reliable evaluation practices. Unlike most forecasting books, this text also explores topics often overlooked or treated separately, including transfer learning across collections of series, synthetic data generation with diffusion models, and self-supervised representation learning. Beyond forecasting, later chapters cover classification, clustering, anomaly detection, and embeddings for large-scale time-series modeling. Throughout, the focus is pragmatic: theory is reinforced through experimentation and implementation so you can apply these methods confidently to real-world time-series problems. What you will learn Build, train, and evaluate neural networks for time series using PyTorch and PyTorch Lightning. Tune models with Bayesian optimisation and validate them with suitable metrics and strategies. Progress from feedforward and recurrent networks to transformers and models such as N-BEATS, N-HiTS, and TFT. Learn how global models use cross- and transfer learning across many series. Generate synthetic series and representations with diffusion and self-supervised methods. Apply modern approaches to classification, clustering, and anomaly detection. Who this book is for This book is for data analysts, scientists, and students who want to know how to apply deep learning methods to time-series forecasting problems with PyTorch for real-world business problems. While the book assumes some understanding of statistics and modeling, you won’t need in-depth knowledge of time series to follow along. Some familiarity with Python is important, but we do not assume any prior knowledge of PyTorch. The main goal of this book is to be accessible to those with little or no experience with deep learning methods in time series. Table of Contents Time Series for Everyone The Challenge of Time Series Evaluating Time-Series Models PyTorch Fundamentals Simple Neural Architecture Optimization Conformal Prediction Recurrent Neural Networks Transformers Other Neural Structures Transfer Learning and Global Modelling Synthetic Time Series Data Diffusion Models Time Series Classification Time Series Clustering Embeddings for Time Series Supervised and Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Self-Supervised Learning for Time Series