Appendix: Using Python

This book uses Python. Python is free, available on almost every operating system, and there are thousands of libraries to do almost anything you want. Python is great.

Fun Fact: Python’s name stems from comedy, not reptiles.

Installing Python

  1. Download and install Python.
  2. Open your command line or terminal. Type python --version. This should display the Python version number if the installation was successful.

Install required libraries

In Python, you can import many libraries, making it versatile.

import antigravity

  1. You can install libraries using pip or an environment manager like conda. We recommend the latter. Here are some steps to set up your environment.

  2. We provide an environment.yml file pinned to the exact package versions this book was built and tested with. Download it, then create and activate the environment with:

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate fpppy

That’s it! You should now be ready.

Python examples in this book

We provide Python code for most examples in shaded boxes like this:

# Import required libraries
import pandas as pd
from statsforecast import StatsForecast
from statsforecast.models import AutoETS
from utilsforecast.plotting import plot_series

# Plot one time series
aus_retail = pd.read_csv('data/aus_retail.csv', parse_dates=['Month'])
df = aus_retail.query('`Series ID` == "A3349640L"')
plot_series(df, id_col='Series ID', time_col='Month', target_col='Turnover')

# Produce some forecasts
sf = StatsForecast(
    models = [AutoETS(season_length=12)],
    freq = 'MS'
)

sf.forecast(df=df, h=24, id_col='Series ID', time_col='Month', target_col='Turnover')

These examples assume that you have the necessary Python libraries installed. You can do this via pip, for example

pip install pandas

Sometimes we assume that the Python code that appears earlier in the same chapter of the book has also been run; so it is best to work through the Python code in the order provided within each chapter.

Getting started with Python

There are many great resources on how to get started with Python. Here are some that we like:

Courses:

Read the docs: