Prophet: Forecasting at Scale
Prophet is a forecasting tool developed and released as open-source software by Facebook’s Core Data Science team. It’s designed to forecast time series data using an additive model incorporating non-linear trends, yearly, weekly, and daily seasonality, and holiday effects. The tool is especially effective with time series that exhibit strong seasonal effects and have multiple seasons of historical data. Prophet is known for its robustness to missing data, trend shifts, and ability to handle outliers effectively.
Key features and insights include:
- Implementation: Prophet is implemented in R and Python, providing flexibility for users familiar with either language.
- Speed and Automation: The tool offers fast and thoroughly automated forecasts, which data scientists and analysts can manually tune.
- Accuracy: Used extensively within Facebook for various forecasting needs, Prophet has consistently outperformed other methods in most cases.
- Flexibility: Despite its automation, Prophet allows users to input domain knowledge and adjust forecasts using human-understandable parameters.
- Future Plans: A 2023 update discusses Prophet’s future directions and plans.