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 conditional seasonalities

Suppose you work for a utility company in a college town and are tasked with forecasting the electricity usage for the coming year. The electricity usage is going to depend on the population of the town to some extent, and as a college town, thousands of students are only temporary residents! How do you set up Prophet to handle this scenario? Conditional seasonalities exist for this purpose.

Conditional seasonalities are those that are, in effect, for only a portion of the dates in the training and future DataFrames. A conditional seasonality must have a cycle that is shorter than the period in which it is active. So, for example, it wouldn’t make sense to have a yearly seasonality that is active for just a few months.

Forecasting electricity usage in the college town would require you to set up either daily or weekly seasonalities – and possibly even both; depending on the usage patterns, one daily/weekly seasonality for the summer...