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 sub-daily data

In this section, we will be using data from the Divvy bike share program in Chicago, Illinois. The data contains the number of bicycle rides taken each hour from the beginning of 2014 through to the end of 2018 and exhibits a general increasing trend along with very strong yearly seasonality. Because it is hourly data and there are very few rides overnight (sometimes zero per hour), the data does show a density of measurements at the low end:

Figure 4.4 – Number of Divvy rides per hour

Figure 4.4 – Number of Divvy rides per hour

Using sub-daily data such as this is much the same as using super-daily data, requiring what we did with the Air Passengers data previously. You as the analyst need to use the freq argument and adjust the periods in the make_future_dataframe method, and Prophet will do the rest. If Prophet sees at least two days of data and the spacing between data is less than one day, it will fit daily seasonality.

Let’s see this in action by making...