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

Summary

Hopefully, you experienced no issues in installing Prophet on your machine at the beginning of this chapter. The potential challenge of installing the Stan dependency is greatly eased by using the Anaconda distribution of Python. After installation, we looked at the CO2 levels measured in the atmosphere 2 miles above the Pacific Ocean at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. We built our first Prophet model and, in just 12 lines of code, were able to forecast the next 10 years of CO2 levels.

After that, we inspected the forecast DataFrame and saw the rich results that Prophet outputs. Finally, we plotted the components of the forecast – the trend, yearly seasonality, and weekly seasonality – to better understand the data’s behavior.

There is a lot more to Prophet than just this simple example, though. In the next chapter, we’ll take a deep dive into the equations behind Prophet’s model to understand how it works.