Installing Prophet

Installing Prophet on your machine is a straightforward process. However, under the hood, Prophet depends upon the Stan programming language, and installing PyStan, the Python interface for it, is unfortunately not so straightforward because it requires many non-standard compilers.

But don’t worry, because there is a really easy way to get Prophet and all dependencies installed, no matter which operating system you use, and that is through Anaconda.

Anaconda is a free distribution of Python that comes bundled with hundreds of additional Python packages that are useful for data science, along with the package management system conda. This is in contrast to installing the Python language from its source on https://www.python.org/, which will include the default Python package manager, called pip.

When pip installs a new package, it will install any dependencies without checking whether these dependent Python packages will conflict with others. This...