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

Saturating forecasts

In the early 1800s, westward expansion in the United States brought many settlers and their livestock into contact with the native wolf population. These wolves began to prey on domestic stock, which resulted in the settlers hunting and killing the wolves in order to protect their own animals. The gray wolf was still present on the land (which became Yellowstone National Park when it was established in 1872), but over the next few decades, they were hunted nearly to extinction in the region and throughout the lower 48 states.

In the 1960s, the public began to understand the idea of ecosystems and the interconnectedness of species, and in 1975, the decision to restore wolf populations to Yellowstone was taken, with 31 gray wolves finally being relocated to the park from Canada in 1995. This provided an almost perfect experiment of natural population growth inside the park.

We’ll look at this population in the next few examples. However, we’ll...