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

Creating the Prophet performance metrics DataFrame

Now that you've learned what the different options are for performance metrics in Prophet, let's start coding and see how to access these. We'll use the same online retail sales data we used in Chapter 11, Cross-Validation. Along with our usual imports, we are going to add the performance_metrics function from Prophet's diagnostics package and the plot_cross_validation_metric function from the plot package:

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from fbprophet import Prophet
from fbprophet.plot import add_changepoints_to_plot
from fbprophet.diagnostics import cross_validation
from fbprophet.diagnostics import performance_metrics
from fbprophet.plot import plot_cross_validation_metric

Next, let's load the data, create our forecast, and plot the results:

df = pd.read_csv('online_retail.csv')
df.columns = ['ds', 'y']
model = Prophet(yearly_seasonality=4)
model...