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

Controlling Growth Modes

So far in this book, every forecast we’ve built has followed only one growth mode: linear. The trend sometimes had some small bends where the slope either increased or decreased, but fundamentally, the trend consisted of linear segments. However, Prophet features two additional growth modes: logistic and flat.

Modeling your time series with a growth mode that is not optimal can often fit the actual data very well. But, as you’ll see in this chapter, even if the fit is realistic, the future forecast can become wildly unrealistic. Sometimes, the shape of the data will inform which growth mode to choose, and sometimes you’ll need domain knowledge and a bit of common sense. This chapter will help guide you to an appropriate selection. Furthermore, you will learn when and how to apply these different growth modes. Specifically, this chapter will cover the following:

  • Applying linear growth
  • Understanding the logistic function
  • ...