Book Image

Forecasting Time Series Data with Facebook Prophet

By : Greg Rafferty
Book Image

Forecasting Time Series Data with Facebook Prophet

By: Greg Rafferty

Overview of this book

Prophet enables Python and R developers to build scalable time series forecasts. This book will help you to implement Prophet’s cutting-edge forecasting techniques to model future data with higher accuracy and with very few lines of code. You will begin by exploring the evolution of time series forecasting, from the basic early models to the advanced models of the present day. The book will demonstrate how to install and set up Prophet on your machine and build your first model with only a few lines of code. You'll then cover advanced features such as visualizing your forecasts, adding holidays, seasonality, and trend changepoints, handling outliers, and more, along with understanding why and how to modify each of the default parameters. Later chapters will show you how to optimize more complicated models with hyperparameter tuning and by adding additional regressors to the model. Finally, you'll learn how to run diagnostics to evaluate the performance of your models and see some useful features when running Prophet in production environments. By the end of this Prophet book, you will be able to take a raw time series dataset and build advanced and accurate forecast models with concise, understandable, and repeatable code.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started
4
Section 2: Seasonality, Tuning, and Advanced Features
13
Section 3: Diagnostics and Evaluation

Summary

In this chapter, you learned a generalized method to add any additional regressors beyond the holidays, which you learned how to add earlier. You learned that adding both binary regressors, such as weather conditions, and continuous regressors, such as temperature, use the same add_regressor method. You also learned how to use the regressor_coefficients function in Prophet's utilities package to inspect the effects of your additional regressors.

Although you may now want to add all sorts of extra regressors to your forecasts, you also learned that Prophet requires all additional regressors to have defined values going into the future or else there's no information to inform a forecast. This is why we only forecasted 2 weeks out when using weather data.

In the next chapter, we are going to look at how Prophet handles outliers and how you can exert greater control over the process yourself.