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

Specifying custom changepoint locations

James Rodríguez is a Colombian soccer player who played in both the 2014 and 2018 World Cups. He was a standout player in both Cups but won the Golden Boot award in 2014 for scoring more goals than any other player in the competition. I chose his account because it exhibits some very interesting behavior that would be extremely difficult to model without changepoints:

Figure 7.10 – James Rodríguez's Instagram likes per day

The number of likes his Instagram posts get is gradually increasing over time. But there are two notable spikes, in the summers of 2014 and 2018 when he was playing in the World Cup. It is clear that the spike in 2014 resulted in a significant trend change. The number of likes his posts were getting increased dramatically during the World Cup and dropped afterwards, but not to the same baseline as before. He had gained a large number of new followers during this period and consistently...