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 learned that the models we built in the first few chapters of this book all featured linear growth. You learned that the logistic function was developed to model population growth and then learned how to implement this in Prophet by modeling the growth of the wolf population in Yellowstone after their reintroduction in 1995.

Logistic growth in Prophet can be modeled as either increasing up to a saturation limit called the cap or decreasing to a saturation limit called the floor. Finally, you learned how to model flat (or no growth) trends, where the trend is fixed to one value for the entire data period but seasonality is still allowed to vary. Throughout this chapter, you used the add_changepoints_to_plot function in order to overlay the trend line on your forecast plots.

Choosing the correct growth mode is important, particularly so when forecasting further into the future. We looked at a couple of examples in this chapter where the incorrect growth...