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

Performing Cross-Validation

The concept of keeping training data and testing data separate is sacrosanct in machine learning and statistics. You should never train a model and test its performance on the same data. Setting data aside for testing purposes has a downside, though: that data has valuable information that you would want to include in training. Cross-validation is a technique that’s used to circumvent this problem.

You may be familiar with k-fold cross-validation, but if you are not, we will briefly cover it in this chapter. K-fold cross-validation, however, will not work on time series data. It requires that the data be independent, an assumption that time series data does not hold. An understanding of k-fold cross-validation will help you learn how forward-chaining cross-validation works and why it is necessary for time series data.

After learning how to perform cross-validation in Prophet, you will learn how to speed up the computing of cross-validation through...