An Introduction to Time Series and the Required Python Knowledge
This is the first chapter of the book that you are reading. Although first chapters usually contain basic information that you might want to skip, this is not such a chapter. It teaches you the basics of time series and indexing, as well as how to set up a proper Python environment, which is going to be used during the development of the code of this book. You might need to refer to it while you are reading other chapters, which is a good thing! So, let us get started!
In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:
- Understanding time series
- What is an index and why do we need indexing?
- The Python knowledge that we are going to need
- Reading time series from disk
- Visualizing time series
- Working with the Matrix Profile
- Exploring the MPdist distance
