Technical requirements
You will need to set up the Anaconda environment following the instructions in the Preface of the book to get a working environment with all the packages and datasets required for the code in this book.
The code for this chapter can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Modern-Time-Series-Forecasting-with-Python-/tree/main/notebooks/Chapter02.
Handling time series data is like handling other tabular datasets, but with a focus on the temporal dimension. As with any tabular dataset, pandas is perfectly equipped to handle time series data as well.
Let’s start getting our hands dirty and work through a dataset from the beginning. We are going to use the London Smart Meters dataset throughout this book. If you have not downloaded the data already as part of the environment setup, go to the Preface and do that now.