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

Seasonality truly is the heart of Prophet. This chapter covered a lot of ground; the foundations you learned here will be used throughout the remaining chapters of this book. Indeed, almost any model you build in Prophet will have seasonality considerations, whereas many of the upcoming chapters cover special cases that may or may not apply to your specific problem.

You started this chapter by learning the difference between additive and multiplicative seasonality, and how to identify whether your dataset features one or the other. We then briefly discussed the Fourier series and demonstrated how a partial Fourier sum can build a very complex periodic curve. Using these ideas, you learned how setting the Fourier order of a seasonality can be used to control its shape by allowing either more or less freedom to bend along its path.

Next, you modeled the 11-year cycle of sunspots and learned how to add custom seasonalities. These custom seasonalities came into use again...