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

Using monthly data

In Chapter 2, Getting Started with Prophet, we built our first Prophet model using the Mauna Loa dataset. The data was reported daily, which is what Prophet expects by default and is therefore why we did not need to change any of Prophet’s default parameters. In this next example, though, let’s take a look at a new set of data that is not reported every day, the Air Passengers dataset, to see how Prophet handles this difference in data granularity.

This is a classic time series dataset spanning 1949 through 1960. It counts the number of passengers on commercial airlines each month during that period of explosive growth in the industry. The Air Passengers dataset, in contrast to the Mauna Loa dataset, has one observation per month. What happens if we attempt to predict future dates?

Let’s create a model and plot the forecast to see what happens. We begin as we did with the Mauna Loa example, by importing the necessary libraries and loading...