How Prophet Works

Sometimes, Prophet can feel like magic, creating a complex forecast with barely any user instructions! But if you understand the equations behind Prophet, you’ll notice that it isn’t magic at all, but in fact, a very flexible algorithm for extracting multiple simultaneous patterns in the data.

All of this math may feel intimidating to those without a strong statistical background, but it is actually quite approachable, and an understanding of the math behind the magic will be to your benefit as you begin to forecast more complex datasets. In this chapter, we’ll walk through all of the relevant equations together. If you start to feel lost, don’t fret! All will become clear as you use Prophet more and more.

This chapter will introduce the reasons Facebook (now, Meta) chose to develop its own forecasting package, rather than rely on one of the many already existing tools. Next, you will learn about Facebook’s forecasting philosophy...