Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who wants to use Facebook's Prophet to improve their forecasts. Data scientists and data analysts, machine learning engineers and software engineers, and even business managers will benefit from the topics covered in this book. All that is required is that the reader is comfortable with working in either Python or R, or is willing to learn how. The business manager who is familiar with Python can follow the examples included in this book and will learn how to modify them to fit their own use cases; the data scientist will gain a more technical understanding of what Prophet is doing under the hood and how it works. However, this book is intended mostly as a how-to guide. It will not provide a fully rigorous explanation of the math and statistics that underpin the equations controlling Prophet. For that, I suggest reading the original Prophet paper: Taylor SJ, Letham B. 2017. Forecasting at scale. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3190v2 (https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3190v2).