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

Getting Started with Prophet

Prophet is an open source piece of software, which means that the entirety of the underlying code is freely available to anyone to inspect and modify. This gives Prophet a great deal of power, as any user can add features or fix bugs, but it also has its downsides. Many closed source software packages, such as Microsoft Word or Tableau, come packaged in their own independent installation file with a neat graphical user interface to not only walk users through installation but also enable them to interact with the software once it has been installed.

Prophet, in contrast, is accessed through either the Python or R programming language and depends upon many additional open source libraries. This gives it great flexibility, as users can tweak features or even add entirely new ones to suit their specific problem, but it comes with the downside of potentially difficult usability. That’s what this book aims to simplify.

In this chapter, we will walk...