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 default country holidays

Prophet uses the Python holidays package to populate a default list of holidays by country and, optionally, by state or province. To specify which region to build a holiday list for, Prophet requires the name or ISO code of that country. A complete list of all countries available, with their ISO codes, and also any states or provinces that can be included, can be viewed in the package’s README file here: https://github.com/dr-prodigy/python-holidays#available-countries.

To add the default holidays, Prophet includes an add_country_holidays method, which simply takes the ISO code for that country. Let’s walk through an example using the Divvy dataset again, first adding holidays for the United States, and then including a few additional holidays specific to Illinois, as Divvy is located in Chicago.

We will begin just as we have learned to do with our other models in this book, by importing the necessary libraries, loading our data,...