Preface

In 2017, Facebook released their Prophet software as open source. This powerful tool was developed by Facebook engineers because their analysts were becoming overwhelmed with the number of business forecasts demanded by managers. The developers of Prophet wanted to simultaneously solve two problems: a) completely automatic forecasting techniques are too brittle and inflexible to handle additional knowledge, and b) analysts who are consistently able to produce high-quality forecasts are rare and require extensive expertise. Prophet successfully solves both of these problems.

Prophet was designed so that forecasts produced with no parameter tuning or other optimization are usually very high quality, but with just a little bit of training, anyone can intuitively tweak the model and increase performance dramatically.

Starting from the most basic model and advancing to the deepest technical dives into Prophet's inner workings, this book will teach you everything there is to know about Facebook's Prophet. Many advanced features not even covered by the official documentation are discussed here, with complete working examples for every topic covered. This book is not intended to provide you the ability to build a Prophet clone from scratch, but it will teach you to use Prophet just as well as, if not better than, Facebook's own highly-trained engineers.