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

Creating multi-day holidays

Sometimes, a holiday or other special event will span several days. Fortunately, Prophet includes functionality to handle these scenarios via the window arguments. The holidays DataFrame we have been building to populate our holidays in the previous examples can include the optional columns of 'lower_window' and 'upper_window'. These columns specify additional days either before or after the main holiday that Prophet will model.

For example, in the previous example, we modeled Christmas and Christmas Eve as two different holidays. Another method would have been just to model Christmas but include a 'lower_window' argument of 1, telling Prophet to include a single day before Christmas as part of the holiday. This assumes, of course, that Christmas Eve will always fall on the day before Christmas. If, however, Christmas Eve were a holiday that floated and did not always fall immediately before Christmas, this window method...