Book Image

Forecasting Time Series Data with Prophet - Second Edition

By : Greg Rafferty
5 (1)
Book Image

Forecasting Time Series Data with Prophet - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Greg Rafferty

Overview of this book

Forecasting Time Series Data with Prophet will help you to implement Prophet's cutting-edge forecasting techniques to model future data with high accuracy using only a few lines of code. This second edition has been fully revised with every update to the Prophet package since the first edition was published two years ago. An entirely new chapter is also included, diving into the mathematical equations behind Prophet's models. Additionally, the book contains new sections on forecasting during shocks such as COVID, creating custom trend modes from scratch, and a discussion of recent developments in the open-source forecasting community. You'll cover advanced features such as visualizing forecasts, adding holidays and trend changepoints, and handling outliers. You'll use the Fourier series to model seasonality, learn how to choose between an additive and multiplicative model, and understand when to modify each model parameter. Later, you'll see 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 in production. By the end of this book, you'll be able to take a raw time series dataset and build advanced and accurate forecasting models with concise, understandable, and repeatable code.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with Prophet
5
Part 2: Seasonality, Tuning, and Advanced Features
14
Part 3: Diagnostics and Evaluation

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to control the fit of the trend line by using changepoints. First, you used Divvy data to see how Prophet automatically selects potential changepoint locations and how you can control this by modifying the default number of potential changepoints and the changepoint range.

Then, you learned a more robust way to control Prophet’s changepoint selection through regularization. Just as with seasonality and holidays, changepoints are regularized by setting the prior scale. You then looked at the Instagram data of James Rodríguez and learned how to model the increase in likes per post he received both during and after the World Cups of 2014 and 2018. Finally, you learned how to blend these two techniques and enrich an automatically selected grid of potential changepoints with your custom changepoint locations.

In the next chapter, we will again look at the Divvy data, but this time, we’ll include the additional columns for...