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

Making interactive plots with Plotly

In this final section, we’ll use the Plotly library to build some interactive plots. Plotly is a completely separate visualization package from the Matplotlib package, which we’ve been using throughout this book. A plot made with Plotly is richly interactive, allowing tooltips on mouse hover, zooming in and out of a plot, and all sorts of other interactivities.

If you’re familiar with Tableau or Power BI, Plotly brings similar interactivity to Python. Additionally, the Plotly team also built Dash, a library for creating web-based dashboards. A full tutorial for creating such a dashboard is beyond the scope of this book, but I encourage you to learn about this valuable tool if you would like to share your Prophet forecasts with a wide audience.

Prophet does not automatically install Plotly as a dependency, so before we begin, you will need to install it on your machine. It is a simple process and can be accomplished through...