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

Updating a fitted model

Forecasting is unique among predictive models in that the value of the data is its recency and each passing moment creates a new set of valuable data to use. A common situation with a forecast model is the need to refit it as more data comes in. The city of Baltimore, for example, may use the crime model to predict how many crimes they might expect to happen tomorrow, so as to better place their officers in advance. Once tomorrow arrives, they can record the actual data, retrain their model, and predict for the next day.

Prophet is unable to handle online data, which means it cannot add a single new data observation and quickly update the model. Prophet must be trained offline—the new observation will be added to the existing data and the model will be completely retrained. But it doesn’t have to be completely retrained from scratch and the following technique will save a lot of time when retraining.

Prophet is essentially an optimization...