Prophet forecasting questions about prophet

[seanjtaylor]

Would you be able to share or upload on the git notebooks folder the code you used for Figure 4 and 5 of your paper?

Unfortunately we don't have permission to share this data publicly, so the notebook wouldn't be runnable. I can work on getting the simulated forecast code into a notebook.

Did you have the same issues with TS/XTS objects? and do you still have to do a lot of massaging/pre-processing when you generate your time series data to feed to Prophet?

We don't really care about the exact type of object used for representing dates because Prophet does not rely on there being a regular sequence of dates. Essentially any type that 1) can be joined to the holidays list and 2) can be mapped to a numeric type is going to be ok. It's one of the advantages of using curve fitting instead of a traditional recursive time series model.

Can Prophet handle more fine grained data like minutes or seconds?

At this time I think you can fit on this kind of data but it won't learn anything from the additional granularity. We're going to add intra-day modeling to the v0.2 release.

Do you still do the other methods of evaluation/validation like the steps highlighted below?

No we tend to only evaluate forecasts for their intended purpose. For goal setting and planning that's often something like mean-absolute error at different forecast horizons (what we report in the paper). Many of the other evaluation procedures that come from traditional time series methods are not as useful in the context of curve fitting.

how do you parallelize Prophet when you have to deal with many time series and bigger data sets.

Typically we use a hash function that maps a time series into a number, e.g. in [0, K-1] and then run forecasts for the time series on K machines simultaneously using this mapping. One each individual machine we may just run a for-loop.

Can we use more than one time-series (as multiple features) for forecasting?

At this time, no. We don't accommodate multiple time series or covariates. We have some ideas about how to do this but haven't implemented them yet. It would be a nice way to contribute to the project to help us start the theoretical work on this.

[loneharoon]

Another point: Can we use more than one time-series (as multiple features) for forecasting?

[khatwaniNikhil]

Hello Sean,
As per your last comment, Would you be able to take out time please and share the simulated forecast code for Figure 4 and 5 of your paper into a notebook?
https://facebookincubator.github.io/prophet/static/prophet_paper_20170113.pdf
Thanks

[AhmedGS]

For multiple features for forecasting I recommend using the R forecasting package with the xreg parameter.