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 data with regular gaps

Throughout your career, you may encounter datasets with regular gaps in reporting, particularly when the data was collected by humans who have working hours, personal hours, and sleeping hours. It simply may not be possible to collect measurements with perfect periodicity.

As you will see when we look at outliers in a later chapter, Prophet is robust in handling missing values. However, when that missing data occurs at regular intervals, Prophet will have no training data at all during those gaps to make estimations with. The seasonality will be constrained during periods where data exists but unconstrained during the gaps, and Prophet’s predictions can exhibit much larger fluctuations than the actual data displays. Let’s see this in action.

Suppose that Divvy’s data had only been collected between the hours of 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. each day. We can simulate this by removing the data from outside these hours from our DataFrame:

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