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

In this chapter, you first learned how to add the default holidays for a country and then went a bit deeper by adding any state or province holidays. After that, you learned how to add custom holidays and expanded this technique to adjust for holidays that span multiple days. Finally, you learned what regularization is and how it is used to control overfitting, and how to apply it globally to all holidays in your model or more granularly by specifying different regularizations for each individual holiday.

Holidays often cause massive spikes in time series and ignoring their effects will cause Prophet to perform very poorly in its forecast results. The tools in this chapter will allow your models to accommodate these external events and provide a way to predict the effects running into the future.

In the next chapter, we’ll look at the different growth modes available in Prophet. So far, all our models have had linear growth, but that may not be the only mode you...