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

Facebook’s motivation for building Prophet

As mentioned when introducing Prophet in Chapter 1, The History and Development of Time Series Forecasting, Facebook noticed that the internal demand for business forecasts was increasing. Its forecasting techniques did not scale well and its analysts were overwhelmed.

Facebook scoured the literature in search of a scalable forecasting methodology. At the time, Facebook’s forecasting was largely done with Rob Hyndman’s forecast package in R (https://github.com/robjhyndman/forecast, now superseded by his fable package: https://github.com/tidyverts/fable). Although powerful, the forecast package required R analysts with specialized data science skills in forecasting and substantial product experience. Further, as Python became more and more popular among new hires, Facebook found itself running short of analysts able to produce high-quality forecasts. Unfortunately, the completely automatic forecasting tools Facebook...