Forecasting Time-Series data with Prophet – Part 1

Note: There’s been some questions (and some issues with my original code). I’ve uploaded a jupyter notebook with corrected code for Part 1 and Part 2.  The notebook can be found here.

This is part 1 of a series where I look at using Prophet for Time-Series forecasting in Python

A lot of what I do in my data analytics work is understanding time series data, modeling that data and trying to forecast what might come next in that data. Over the years I’ve used many different approaches, library and modeling techniques for modeling and forecasting with some success…and a lot of failure.

Recently, I’ve been looking for a simpler approach for my initial modeling and think I’ve found a very nice library in Facebook’s Prophet (available for both python and R). While this particular library isn’t terribly robust, it is quick and gives some very good results for that initial pass at modeling / forecasting time series data.  An added bonus with Prophet for those that like to understand the theory behind things is this white paper with a very good description of the math / statistical approach behind Prophet.


If you are interested in learning more about time-series forecasting, check out the books / websites below.


Installing Prophet

To get started with Prophet, you’ll first need to install it (of course).

Installation instructions can be found here, but it should be as easy as doing the following (if you have an existing system that has the proper compilers installed):

pip install fbprophet

For those running conda, you can install prophet via conda-forge using the following command:

conda install -c conda-forge fbprophet

Note: Prophet requres pystan, so you may need to also do the following (although in my case, it was installed as a requirement of fbprophet):

pip install pystan

Pystan documentation can be found here.

Getting started

Using Prophet is extremely straightforward. You import it, load some data into a pandas dataframe, set the data up into the proper format and then start modeling / forecasting.

First, import the module (plus some other modules that we’ll need):

from fbprophet import Prophet
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

Now, let’s load up some data. For this example,  I’m going to be using the retail sales example csv file find on github.

sales_df = pd.read_csv('../examples/retail_sales.csv')

Now, we have a pandas dataframe with our data that looks something like this:

Prophet pandas dataframe example

Note the format of the dataframe. This is the format that Prophet expects to see. There needs to be a ‘ds’ column  that contains the datetime field and and a ‘y’ column that contains the value we are wanting to model/forecast.

Before we can do any analysis with this data, we need to log transform the ‘y’ variable to a try to convert non-stationary data to stationary. This also converts trends to more linear trends (see this website for more info). This isn’t always a perfect way to handle time-series data, but it works often enough that it can be tried initially without much worry.

To log-tranform the data, we can use np.log() on the ‘y’ column like this:

sales_df['y_orig'] = sales_df['y'] # to save a copy of the original data..you'll see why shortly. 
# log-transform y
sales_df['y'] = np.log(sales_df['y'])

Your dataframe should now look like the following:

log transformed data for Prophet

Its time to start the modeling.  You can do this easily with the following command:

model = Prophet() #instantiate Prophet
model.fit(sales_df); #fit the model with your dataframe

If you are running with monthly data, you’ll most likely see the following message after you run the above commands:

Disabling weekly seasonality. Run prophet with weekly_seasonality=True to override this.

You can ignore this message since we are running monthly data.

Now its time to start forecasting. With Prophet, you start by building some future time data with the following command:

future_data = model.make_future_dataframe(periods=6, freq = 'm')

In this line of code, we are creating a pandas dataframe with 6 (periods = 6) future data points with a monthly frequency (freq = ‘m’).  If you’re working with daily data, you wouldn’t want include freq=’m’.

Now we forecast using the ‘predict’ command:

forecast_data = model.predict(future_data)

If you take a quick look at the data using .head() or .tail(), you’ll notice there are a lot of columns in the forecast_data dataframe. The important ones (for now) are ‘ds’ (datetime), ‘yhat’ (forecast), ‘yhat_lower’ and ‘yhat_upper’ (uncertainty levels).

You can view only these columns in a .tail() by running the following command.

forecast_data[['ds', 'yhat', 'yhat_lower', 'yhat_upper']].tail()

Your dataframe should look like:

prophet forecasted data

Let’s take a look at a graph of this data to get an understanding of how well our model is working.

model.plot(forecast_data)

fbprophet forecast graph

That looks pretty good. Now, let’s take a look at the seasonality and trend components of our /data/model/forecast.

model.plot_components(forecast_data)

Prophet component plot for seasonality and trend

Since we are working with monthly data, Prophet will plot the trend and the yearly seasonality but if you were working with daily data, you would also see a weekly seasonality plot included.

From the trend and seasonality, we can see that the trend is a playing a large part in the underlying time series and seasonality comes into play more toward the beginning and the end of the year.

So far so good.  With the above info, we’ve been able to quickly model and forecast some data to get a feel for what might be coming our way in the future from this particular data set.

Before we go on to tweaking this model (which I’ll talk about in my next post), I wanted to share a little tip for getting your forecast plot to display your ‘original’ data so you can see the forecast in ‘context’ and in the original scale rather than the log-transformed data. You can do this by using np.exp() to get our original data back.

forecast_data_orig = forecast_data # make sure we save the original forecast data
forecast_data_orig['yhat'] = np.exp(forecast_data_orig['yhat'])
forecast_data_orig['yhat_lower'] = np.exp(forecast_data_orig['yhat_lower'])
forecast_data_orig['yhat_upper'] = np.exp(forecast_data_orig['yhat_upper'])

Let’s take a look at the forecast with the original data:

model.plot(forecast_data_orig)

fbprophet forecast data with original data

Something looks wrong (and it is)!

Our original data is drawn on the forecast but the black dots (the dark line at the bottom of the chart) is our log-transform original ‘y’ data. For this to make any sense, we need to get our original ‘y’ data points plotted on this chart. To do this, we just need to rename our ‘y_orig’ column in the sales_df dataframe to ‘y’ to have the right data plotted. Be careful here…you want to make sure you don’t continue analyzing data with the non-log-transformed data.

sales_df['y_log']=sales_df['y'] #copy the log-transformed data to another column
sales_df['y']=sales_df['y_orig'] #copy the original data to 'y'

And…plot it.

model.plot(forecast_data_orig)

fbprohpet original corrected

There we go…a forecast for retail sales 6 months into the future (you have to look closely at the very far right-hand side for the forecast). It looks like the next six months will see sales between 450K and 475K.


Check back soon for my next post on using Prophet for forecasting time-series data where I talk about how to tweak the models that come out of prophet.

 

 

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Geoff
Geoff
5 years ago

A very helpful post. Just tried Prophet out on some atmospheric measurements. Looks promising.

Chandra Sutrisno
Chandra Sutrisno
5 years ago

Hi Eric,

Thank you for providing this tutorial. Can you tell me what is the black on the first chart?

Sintyadi Thong
5 years ago

hi Eric, this is very helpful.
I would also like to know, how can we incorporate it with multiple SKUs, therefore I would like to get the forecast result for each SKU, so I have 3 columns, [SKU], [ds] and [y] in one single CSV.

Thanks~

Sintyadi Thong
5 years ago

Thanks~
I wonder if we make a function definition (def), we might be able run multiple SKUs through loop. But still not aware how to do this as I am new to python.

Alberto Guffanti
Alberto Guffanti
5 years ago

Hi Eric, thanks for the very nice tutorial! Extremely helpful!
One problem I seem to have is that when I transform back to the original data and plot the forecast, I do not get your final plot, rather still get the data points for the log-transformed data.
Do you have any idea about why that should be the case?
Best!

Matt
Matt
5 years ago

Hi Eric,

Great post! Just one small issue. Finally while transforming the original data from log to actual scale you modify the input data frame: sales_df.
sales_df[‘y_log’]=sales_df[‘y’] #copy the log-transformed data to another column
sales_df[‘y’]=sales_df[‘y_orig’] #copy the original data to ‘y’.

However, shouldn’t you modify forecast_data_orig? I think that’s the reason Alberto’s code is not displaying the original y values in normal scale.

Trevor W
Trevor W
5 years ago

Quick typo correction, at
> Let’s take a look at the forecast with the original data:
`forecast_data = m.predict(future_data)`

I think it should be:
`forecast_data = model.predict(future_data)`

Also, I don’t fully understand the need to log transform the data first. It appears I get nearly the same results on my dataset (Weekly Gross Sales, 3 years of back data).

Any ideas why this could be or where my naiveté is?

DataUser
DataUser
5 years ago

plot() was throwing error, any ideas on how to resolve this issue ( Environment : Jupyter with python 3 )
model.plot(forecast_data)

Error:
TypeError: ufunc ‘isfinite’ not supported for the input types, and the inputs could not be safely coerced to any supported types according to the casting rule ”safe”

Oscar Garcia
Oscar Garcia
5 years ago

Hi Eric,
Does Prophet works with hourly data? I have hourly data for a building power consumption and want to forecast values for the next 24 hours. I have daily seasonality, and apparently daily_seasonality is not supported but I could be wrong..

I appreciate your feedback!
Thanks,
Oscar

Oscar Garcia
Oscar Garcia
5 years ago

Thanks,
I tried this:

model = Prophet()
model.fit(mwh_df)
future_data = model.make_future_dataframe(periods=24, freq =’H’)

but the results doesn’t look right…

Oscar Garcia
Oscar Garcia
5 years ago

Thanks, V0.2 was released on Sep 12 🙂

I gave it a try. I think it works but my forecast values doesn’t look accurate. They seem to follow the same pattern (trend) every day. Any idea what could be happening? Sorry I tried to add an image to my comment but looks that’s not supported.

Surender
Surender
5 years ago

What are the other options with “freq” in the below line :
future_data = model.make_future_dataframe(periods=6, freq = ‘m’)

Does w stands for weekly OR for annually is it “a” or “y”

Thanks in advance

Priya Shaji
Priya Shaji
5 years ago

how can the accuracy of predictions done by fbprophet be shown??
or does it have a standard accuracy methods

Haseeb Shehzad
Haseeb Shehzad
5 years ago

If I log transform my data, the prediction values do not make any sense. But without log transformation, I have pretty good graphs, What could be the reason for that?

Raman
Raman
5 years ago

Hi
Is Prophet suitable for data sampled ever 5 seconds over a day. Need to forecast 60 to 300 seconds out

sam
sam
4 years ago

Hi Eric,
here fbprophet only gives results upon train cases and but what about test cases?

Joy
Joy
4 years ago

I’m using daily data and would like to allow users to input future dates and ratios that would impact the forecast. Will Prophet allow for it? Do changepoints allow users to input the future dates?

jon
jon
4 years ago

Great articles.
Does Prophet work on Multiple regression model?
THANKS

Riyaz Pasha
Riyaz Pasha
4 years ago

The tutorial was very helpful, Sir how can I perform the multivariate time series analysis. If yes which model(Arima or VAR) to apply and how to do it. I need some information about this from your side.

Chris
Chris
3 years ago

Does Prophet support use of additional predictor variables such a promotion discount, events and holidays that are national or regional?