Analyst-in-the-loop forecasting
When developing Prophet, Facebook took great care to ensure that the default settings for all parameters would give great results for a wide variety of business cases. However, there are always edge cases, challenging datasets, or simply a forecast that doesn’t quite match expectations. In these situations where the forecast is not satisfactory, the analyst is not stuck with fully automated results. Any analyst, even a beginner forecaster, can improve the forecast by tweaking a variety of easily interpretable parameters. Facebook dubs this process analyst-in-the-loop forecasting (see Figure 3.1).
Figure 3.1 – Analyst-in-the-loop forecasting
Analyst-in-the-loop forecasting is an iterative process. The analyst starts by using Prophet to build a model using the default parameters. Prophet has been optimized for speed, so in (usually) just a few seconds, it can output a very acceptable forecast. Prophet can then...
