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

Correcting outliers that cause seasonality swings

We’ll be using a new dataset in this chapter to look at outliers – the average number of likes per day of posts on National Geographic’s Instagram account, @NatGeo. This data was collected on November 21, 2019.

I’ve chosen this dataset because it exhibits several significant outliers, which are marked in the following plot:

Figure 10.1 – Outliers on National Geographic’s Instagram account

Figure 10.1 – Outliers on National Geographic’s Instagram account

Each dashed vertical line indicates a moment where the time series deviated significantly. The second line from the left indicates a radical trend change in the summer of 2015, but the other four lines indicate outliers, with the last two outliers spanning across wide time ranges. We’ll specifically be looking at the line occurring in mid-2016, in August to be precise. This represents the most extreme outliers. The 2014 set of outliers can be safely ignored, as they do...