Book Image

R Statistics Cookbook

By : Francisco Juretig
2 (2)
Book Image

R Statistics Cookbook

2 (2)
By: Francisco Juretig

Overview of this book

R is a popular programming language for developing statistical software. This book will be a useful guide to solving common and not-so-common challenges in statistics. With this book, you'll be equipped to confidently perform essential statistical procedures across your organization with the help of cutting-edge statistical tools. You'll start by implementing data modeling, data analysis, and machine learning to solve real-world problems. You'll then understand how to work with nonparametric methods, mixed effects models, and hidden Markov models. This book contains recipes that will guide you in performing univariate and multivariate hypothesis tests, several regression techniques, and using robust techniques to minimize the impact of outliers in data.You'll also learn how to use the caret package for performing machine learning in R. Furthermore, this book will help you understand how to interpret charts and plots to get insights for better decision making. By the end of this book, you will be able to apply your skills to statistical computations using R 3.5. You will also become well-versed with a wide array of statistical techniques in R that are extensively used in the data science industry.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Facebook's automatic Prophet forecasting

Facebook's core data science team has developed and released an automatic tool for large-scale forecasting. It does a particularly great job with highly seasonal time series, and series with complex trends. Prophet's internal algorithm for detecting trend breakpoints is particularly interesting. Even though it works with any periodicity, it works best with daily data.

Although the algorithm can be used with little to no time series knowledge, experienced users can tweak many of its parameters.

According to its documentation, it has four components:

  • Trend detection via a piecewise linear trend, or nonlinear growth curves. This is relevant because some of the time series tasks that Facebook has encountered are phenomena where the data reaches saturation.
  • A yearly seasonal component.
  • A monthly seasonal component.
  • A list...