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

Forecasting Holiday Effects

Because Prophet was designed to handle business forecasting cases, it is important to include the effects of holidays, which naturally play a large role in business activities. Just as bike-share commuters will ride more frequently in the summer than in the winter, or on Tuesdays than on Sundays, it is reasonable to hypothesize that they would ride less than otherwise expected on Thanksgiving, for example.

Fortunately, Prophet includes robust support for including the effects of holidays in your forecasts. Furthermore, the techniques Prophet has for including the effects of holidays can be used to add any holiday-like event, such as the food festival that we will model in this chapter.

Similar to the seasonality effects you learned about in the previous chapter, Prophet contains default holidays that you can apply to your models, as well as custom holidays that you can create yourself. This chapter will cover both situations. Additionally, you will...