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

Installing Prophet

Installing Prophet on your machine is a straightforward process. However, under the hood, Prophet depends upon the Stan programming language, and installing PyStan, the Python interface for it, is unfortunately not so straightforward because it requires many non-standard compilers.

But don’t worry, because there is a really easy way to get Prophet and all dependencies installed, no matter which operating system you use, and that is through Anaconda.

Anaconda is a free distribution of Python that comes bundled with hundreds of additional Python packages that are useful for data science, along with the package management system conda. This is in contrast to installing the Python language from its source on https://www.python.org/, which will include the default Python package manager, called pip.

When pip installs a new package, it will install any dependencies without checking whether these dependent Python packages will conflict with others. This...