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

Adding default country holidays

Prophet uses the Python holidays package to populate a default list of holidays by country and, optionally, by state or province. To specify which region to build a holiday list for, Prophet requires the name or ISO code of that country. A complete list of all countries available, with their ISO codes, and also any states or provinces that can be included, can be viewed in the package's README file here: https://github.com/dr-prodigy/python-holidays#available-countries.

To add the default holidays, Prophet includes an add_country_holidays method, which simply takes the ISO code for that country. Let's walk through an example using the Divvy dataset again, first adding holidays for the United States, and then including a few additional holidays specific to Illinois, as Divvy is located in Chicago.

We begin just as we have learned to do with our other models in this book, by importing the necessary libraries, loading our data, and instantiating...