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

Understanding the logistic function

The logistic function generates an S-shaped curve; the equation takes the following form:

Here, is the maximum value of the curve, is the logistic growth rate, or steepness, of the curve, and is the x value of the curve’s midpoint.

Taking , , and , the logistic function produces the standard logistic function, , as seen in the following plot:

Figure 7.2 – The standard logistic function

Figure 7.2 – The standard logistic function

If you have studied logistic regression or neural networks, you may recognize this as the sigmoid function. Any input value for x, from -∞ to ∞, will be squished into an output value, y, between 0 and 1. This equation is what allows a logistic regression model to accept any input value and output a probability between 0 and 1.

The equation was developed by Pierre François Verhulst, a Belgian mathematician, in a series of three papers published between 1838 and 1847. Verhulst...