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

Installing Prophet

Installing Facebook Prophet on your machine is an easy and straightforward process. However, under the hood, Prophet depends upon the Stan programming language, and installing PyStan, the Python interface for it, is unfortunately not so straightforward because it requires many non-standard compilers.

But don't worry, because there is a really easy way to get Prophet and all dependencies installed, no matter which operating system you use, and that is through Anaconda.

Anaconda is a free distribution of Python that comes bundled with hundreds of additional Python packages that are useful for data science, along with the package management system conda. This is in contrast to installing the Python language from its source on https://www.python.org/, which will include the default Python package manager, called pip.

When pip installs a new package, it will install any dependencies without checking whether these dependent Python packages will conflict with...