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

Modeling shocks such as COVID-19 lockdowns

In mid-2020, forecasters the world over were at a loss for what to predict in the coming months and years. The COVID-19 pandemic utterly transformed life around the world and, with it, many time series. Online purchases skyrocketed beyond anything anyone had predicted at the beginning of 2020; consumption of media such as Netflix and YouTube dramatically increased, while in-person event attendance dramatically decreased.

As brilliant as Prophet can be when it comes to forecasting, it cannot simply predict the future. In the midst of the pandemic, Prophet would have struggled just as much as the forecasting experts at predicting when the pandemic would end and how time series would behave both during and after the lockdowns. However, we can model such shocks to the system after the fact in order to understand what effect they had. And just like the NatGeo promotion we modeled in the previous section, we can predict what would result from...