Chapter 2: Getting Started with Facebook Prophet

Prophet is an open source piece of software, which means that the entirety of the underlying code is freely available to anyone to inspect and modify. This gives Prophet a great deal of power as any user can add features or fix bugs, but it also has its downsides. Many closed source software packages, such as Microsoft Word or Tableau, come packaged in their own independent installation file with a neat graphical user interface to not only walk users through installation but also enable them to interact with the software once it's installed.

Prophet, in contrast, is accessed through either the Python or R programming languages and depends upon many additional open source libraries. This gives it great flexibility as users can tweak features or even add entirely new ones to suit their specific problem, but it comes with the downside of potentially difficult usability. That's what this book aims to simplify.

In this chapter...