Meta Prophet MLM

Question 1

Meta’s Prophet

Answer 1

Meta’s Prophet is a procedure for forecasting time series data based on an additive model where non-linear trends are fit with yearly, weekly, and daily seasonality, plus holiday effects.

Question 2

1. Introduction

Answer 2

Prophet, developed by Facebook’s Core Data Science team, is an open-source forecasting library designed for business time series data which can have irregular trends and seasonalities. It works best with time series that have strong seasonal effects and several seasons of historical data.

Question 3

2. Additive Regression Model

Answer 3

Prophet is based on an additive model where non-linear trends are fit with seasonality and holiday effects. It can accommodate seasonality with multiple periods, which is a common scenario in business.

Question 4

3. Automatic Forecasting

Answer 4

The tool performs forecasting tasks automatically and provides intuitive parameters which are easy to tune, making it accessible to non-experts as well.

Question 5

4. Outliers and Missing Data

Answer 5

Prophet is robust to missing data and shifts in the trend, and it typically handles outliers well.

Question 6

5. Trend Flexibility

Answer 6

It automatically detects changes in trends by selecting changepoints from the data.

Question 7

6. Uncertainty Intervals

Answer 7

Prophet also provides uncertainty intervals for the forecast.

Question 8

7. Customizability

Answer 8

Users can use Prophet to implement and combine many types of models, like growth curves and seasonality with different rates. Custom seasonality and holiday effects can also be added.

Question 9

8. Applications

Answer 9

Prophet is optimized for the business forecast tasks we have encountered at Facebook, which typically have any of the following characteristics hourly, daily, or weekly observations with at least a few months (preferably a year) of history, strong multiple “human-scale” seasonalities, day of week and time of year, important holidays that occur at irregular intervals, and a reasonable number of missing observations or large outliers.

Question 10

9. Implementations

Answer 10

Prophet is open source software released by Facebook’s Core Data Science team and is available in both Python and R.