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

Adding custom seasonalities

So far, the only seasonalities we have worked with are the defaults in Prophet: yearly, weekly, and daily. But there is no reason to limit ourselves to these seasonalities. If your data contains a cycle that is either longer or shorter than the 365.25-day yearly cycle, the 7-day weekly cycle, or the 1-day daily cycle, Prophet makes it easy to model this seasonality yourself.

A great example of a non-standard seasonality is the 11-year cycle of sunspots. Sunspots are regions on the Sun’s surface that temporarily exhibit a much-reduced temperature, and hence appear much darker than surrounding areas.

Beginning in approximately 1609, Galileo Galilei began systematic observation of sunspots and over the last 400+ years, this phenomenon has been constantly recorded. Sunspots represent the longest continuously recorded time series of any natural phenomenon. Through these observations, scientists have identified a quasi-periodic cycle of 11 years during...