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 a custom trend

A key advantage of open source software is that any user can download the source code and make their own modifications to better suit the software to their own use case. Although nearly all common time series can be appropriately modeled with the three trend modes implemented in Prophet (piecewise linear, piecewise logistic, and flat), there may be cases when you need a different trend model than provided; as Prophet is open source, it is relatively easy to create whatever you need. A quick caveat though: it is relatively easy only conceptually. Mathematically, it can be quite complex, and you must have solid software engineering skills to understand how to modify the code successfully.

Let’s look at an example of what is possible. Consider a small clothing retailer, which updates its collection for each season:

df = pd.read_csv('../data/clothing_retailer.csv')
df['ds'] = pd.to_datetime(df['ds'])

Daily sales are...