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

In this chapter, you took the lessons learned from the basic Mauna Loa model you built in Chapter 2, Getting Started with Prophet, and learned what changes you need to make when the periodicity of your data is not daily. Specifically, you used the Air Passengers dataset to model monthly data and used the freq argument when making your future DataFrame in order to hold back Prophet from making daily predictions.

Then, you used the hourly data from Divvy’s bike share program to set the future frequency to hourly so that Prophet would increase the granularity of its prediction timescale. Finally, you simulated periodic missing data in the Divvy dataset and learned a different way to match the future DataFrame’s schedule to that of the training data, in order to prevent Prophet from making unconstrained predictions.

Now that you know how to handle the different datasets you will encounter in this book, you’re ready for the next topic! In the next chapter...