Template Credit: Adapted from a template made available by Dr. Jason Brownlee of Machine Learning Mastery.

SUMMARY: The purpose of this project is to construct a time series prediction model and document the end-to-end steps using a template. The USA Housing Starts dataset is a time series situation where we are trying to forecast future outcomes based on past data points.

INTRODUCTION: The problem is to forecast the monthly housing starts in the US. The dataset describes a time-series of housing starts over 11 years (1965-1975) in the US, and there are 132 monthly observations. We used the first 80% of the observations for training and testing various models while holding back the remaining observations for validating the final model.

ANALYSIS: The baseline prediction (or persistence) for the dataset resulted in an RMSE of 13,059. After performing a grid search for the most optimal ARIMA parameters, the final ARIMA non-seasonal order was (4, 0, 4) with the seasonal order being (1, 0, 1, 12). Furthermore, the chosen model processed the validation data with an RMSE of 6276, which was better than the baseline model as expected.

CONCLUSION: For this dataset, the chosen ARIMA model achieved a satisfactory result and should be considered for further modeling.

Dataset Used: U.S. Housing Starts 1965 – 1975

Dataset ML Model: Time series forecast with numerical attributes

Dataset Reference: Rob Hyndman and Yangzhuoran Yang (2018). tsdl: Time Series Data Library. v0.1.0. https://pkg.yangzhuoranyang./tsdl/

The HTML formatted report can be found here on GitHub.