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 a generalized method to add any additional regressors beyond the holidays, which you learned how to add earlier. You learned that adding both binary regressors (such as weather conditions) and continuous regressors (such as temperature) uses the same add_regressor method. You also learned how to use the regressor_coefficients function in Prophet’s utilities package to inspect the effects of your additional regressors.

Although you may now want to add all sorts of extra regressors to your forecasts, you also learned that Prophet requires all additional regressors to have defined values going into the future or else there’s no information to inform a forecast. This is why we only forecasted 2 weeks out when using weather data.

In the next chapter, we are going to look at how Prophet handles outliers and how you can exert greater control over the process yourself.