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

Using monthly data

In Chapter 2, Getting Started with Facebook Prophet, we built our first Prophet model using the Mauna Loa dataset. The data was reported every day, which is what Prophet by default will expect and is therefore why we did not need to change any of Prophet's default parameters. In this next example, though, let's take a look at a new set of data that is not reported every day, the Air Passengers dataset, to see how Prophet handles this difference in data granularity.

This is a classic time series dataset spanning 1949 through 1960. It counts the number of passengers on commercial airlines each month during that period of explosive growth in the industry. The Air Passengers dataset, in contrast to the Mauna Loa dataset, has one observation per month. What happens if we attempt to predict future dates?

Let's create a model and plot the forecast to see what happens. We begin as we did with the Mauna Loa example, by importing the necessary libraries...