The History and Development of Time Series Forecasting

Prophet is a powerful tool for creating, visualizing, and optimizing your forecasts! With Prophet, you’ll be able to understand what factors will drive your future results, which will enable you to make more confident decisions. You accomplish these tasks and goals through an intuitive but very flexible programming interface that is designed for both the beginner and expert alike.

You don’t need a deep knowledge of the math or statistics behind time series forecasting techniques to leverage the power of Prophet, although if you do possess this knowledge, Prophet includes a rich feature set that allows you to deploy your experience to great effect. You’ll be working in a structured paradigm where each problem follows the same pattern, allowing you to spend less time figuring out how to optimize your forecasts and more time discovering key insights to supercharge your decisions.

This chapter introduces the foundational ideas behind time series forecasting and discusses some of the key model iterations that eventually led to the development of Prophet. In this chapter, you’ll learn what time series data is and why it must be handled differently than non-time series data, and then you’ll discover the most powerful innovations, of which Prophet is one of the latest. Specifically, we will cover the following topics:

• Understanding time series forecasting
• Moving averages and exponential smoothing
• ARIMA
• ARCH/GARCH
• Neural networks
• Prophet
• Recent developments