Technical requirements
You will work with the sktime library, described on its GitHub repository as “a unified framework for machine learning with time series.” Behind the scenes, sktime is a wrapper around other popular ML and time-series libraries, including scikit-learn.
Creating a new Python environment when installing new libraries such as sktime is always a good idea. If you need a quick refresher on creating a virtual Python environment, check out the Development environment setup recipe in Chapter 0 on GitHub, which covers two methods: using conda and venv.
To install sktime using pip, you can run the following:
pip install "sktime[all_extras]"
This command installs all optional dependencies, which can be resource-intensive. If you encounter issues, consider installing only the necessary components (e.g., sktime[forecasting]).
Loading the datasets
You will be working with three CSV files in this chapter: Monthly...