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

Including Additional Regressors

In your first model in Chapter 2, Getting Started with Prophet, you forecasted carbon dioxide levels at Mauna Loa using only the date (but no other information) to predict future values. Later, in Chapter 6, Forecasting Holiday Effects, you learned how to add holidays as additional information to further refine your predictions of bicycle ridership in the Divvy bike share network in Chicago.

The way holidays are implemented in Prophet is actually a special case of adding a binary regressor. In fact, Prophet includes a generalized method for adding any additional regressor, both binary and continuous.

In this chapter, you’ll enrich your Divvy dataset with weather information by including it as an additional regressor. First, you will add binary weather conditions to describe the presence or absence of sun, clouds, or rain, and then you will bring in continuous temperature measurements. Using additional regressors can allow you to include...