python - How to build an prediction model which takes input in date_time format?

Question

Dataset Image

I have been working on predicting water usage on a weekly basis. I have starting day of every week in one column and water consumed in another column, I want my model prediction in such a way that I give the input in date time format like 21-01-2021 (say)in the predict() function. Which model and how can I achieve this? I've previously tried with ARIMA model in time series analysis.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65942180/how-to-build-an-prediction-model-which-takes-input-in-date-time-format

Answer 1

Most of the ML/DL algorithms use floating point input values, that said and based on most of the datasets that I've seen, you should do some data transformation and compute a time delta (you'd see something like TimeDT). That's done setting a setting a base date (the first date that appears in you train data) compute next row delta based on your criteria (seconds, hours or days elapsed, etc).

TL;DR

As I understood you're computing based on the day of the week (correct me please if I'm wrong), so your time delta would be daily, restarting each week? the most appropriated in that case is based on the calendar, decompose the date and add two new features: week_of_year and day_of_week.

Is week_of_year important? well, in summer might be a tendency on consume more water, that's something your dataset can tell you.