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

Handling irregular cut-offs

We’ll be using a new dataset for this example. The World Food Programme (WFP) is the branch of the United Nations focused on hunger and food security. One of the greatest contributing factors to food security issues in developing countries that the WFP tracks is rainfall because it can affect agricultural production. Thus, predicting rainfall is of critical importance in planning aid delivery.

This data represents the rainfall received over 30 years in one of the regions the WFP monitors. What makes this dataset unique is that the WFP recorded the amount of rain that accumulated three times per month, on the 1st, the 11th, and the 21st. The accumulation from the 1st to the 11th is a 10-day period. It’s the same from the 11th to the 21st. But the period from the 21st of one month to the 1st of the next varies depending upon the month. In a normal February, it will be 8 days. In a leap year, 9 days. Months of 30 and 31 days will see a period...