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

This chapter introduced you to the development of Prophet, from the idea’s genesis up to the theoretical formulation. This chapter provided, however, just a summary of the mathematical equations that describe how Prophet works. For full details, please refer to the original paper describing Prophet: Taylor, S. J. and Letham, B. 2017. Forecasting at scale. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3190v2 (https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3190v2).

Now that you understand how Prophet works, the remainder of this book will be spent demonstrating all of the parameters and additional features available that allow you to have greater control over your forecasts. In the next chapter, we’ll take a look at non-daily data to see what precautions and adjustments need to be taken, thereby preparing us to handle datasets with different time granularities.