Chapter 5: Holidays
Because Prophet was designed to handle business forecasting cases, it is important to include the effects of holidays, which naturally play a large role in business activities. Just as bike-share commuters will ride more frequently in the summer than the winter, or on Tuesdays than on Sundays, it is reasonable to hypothesize that they would ride less than otherwise expected on Thanksgiving, for example.
Fortunately, Prophet includes robust support for including the effects of holidays in your forecasts. Furthermore, the techniques Prophet has for including the effects of holidays can be used to add any holiday-like event, such as the food festival that we will model in this chapter.
Similar to the seasonality effects you learned about in the previous chapter, Prophet contains default holidays that you can apply to your models, as well as custom holidays that you can create yourself. This chapter will cover both situations. Additionally, you will learn how...
