Analyzing Time Series and Sequential Data

This course focuses on data exploration, feature creation, and feature selection for time sequences. The topics discussed include binning, smoothing, transformations, and data set operations for time series, spectral analysis, singular spectrum analysis, distance measures, and motif analysis. In this course you learn to perform motif analysis and implement analyses in the spectral or frequency domain. You also discover how distance measures work, implement applications, explore signal components, and create time series features. This course is appropriate for analysts with a quantitative background as well as domain experts who would like to augment their time-series tool box. Before taking this course, you should be comfortable with basic statistical concepts. You can gain this experience by completing the Statistics with SAS course. Familiarity with matrices and principal component analysis are also helpful but not required.

In this course you learn to build, refine, extrapolate, and, in some cases, interpret models designed for a single, sequential series. There are three modeling approaches presented. The traditional, Box-Jenkins approach for modeling time series is covered in the first part of the course. This presentation moves students from models for stationary data, or ARMA, to models for trend and seasonality, ARIMA, and concludes with information about specifying transfer function components in an ARIMAX, or time series regression, model. A Bayesian approach to modeling time series is considered next. The basic Bayesian framework is extended to accommodate autoregressive variation in the data as well as dynamic input variable effects. Machine learning algorithms for time series is the third approach. Gradient boosting and recurrent neural network algorithms are particularly well suited for accommodating nonlinear relationships in the data. Examples are provided to build intuition on the effective use of these algorithms. The course concludes by considering how forecasting precision can be improved by combining the strengths of the different approaches. The final lesson includes demonstrations on creating combined (or ensemble) and hybrid model forecasts. This course is appropriate for analysts interested in augmenting their machine learning skills with analysis tools that are appropriate for assaying, modifying, modeling, forecasting, and managing data that consist of variables that are collected over time. This course uses a variety of different software tools. Familiarity with Base SAS, SAS/ETS, SAS/STAT, and SAS Visual Forecasting, as well as open-source tools for sequential data handling and modeling, is helpful but not required. The lessons on Bayesian analysis and machine learning models assume some prior knowledge of these topics. One way that students can acquire this background is by completing these SAS Education courses: Bayesian Analyses Using SAS and Machine Learning Using SAS Viya.