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

SUMMARY: The project aims to construct a time series prediction model and document the end-to-end steps using a template. The USA Housing Starts dataset is a univariate time series situation where we attempt 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 sales 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, holding back the remaining observations to validate the final model.

ANALYSIS: The baseline persistence model yielded an RMSE of 28,010. The ConvLSTM model processed the same test data with an RMSE of 8,940, which was better than the baseline model as expected. In an earlier ARIMA modeling experiment, the best ARIMA model with non-seasonal order of (4, 0, 4) and seasonal order of (1, 0, 1, 12) processed the validation data with an RMSE of 6,276.

CONCLUSION: For this dataset, the TensorFlow ConvLSTM model achieved an acceptable result, and we should consider using TensorFlow for further modeling.

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

Dataset ML Model: Time series forecast with numerical attribute

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.