Prophet: forecasting at scale
This is an interesting project, and in one of the areas where almost all businesses could do better. Anecdotally, there is a ton of money left on the table by established businesses that do it poorly, which also leaves lots of room for resume-padding technical experience. So anything that claims to improve the state of the art of automated forecasting is definitely worth watching.<p>That being said this claim in point #1 baffles me:<p>&gt; Prophet makes it much more straightforward to create a reasonable, accurate forecast. The forecast package includes many different forecasting techniques (ARIMA, exponential smoothing, etc), each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and tuning parameters. We have found that choosing the wrong model or parameters can often yield poor results, and it is unlikely that even experienced analysts can choose the correct model and parameters efficiently given this array of choices.<p>The forecast package contains an auto.arima function which does full parameter optimization using AIC which is just as hands free as is claimed of Prophet. I have been using it commercially and successfully for years now. Maybe prophet produces better models (I&#x27;ll definitely take a look myself), but to claim that it&#x27;s not possible to get good results without experience seems a bit disingenuous.<p>As an aside, anybody interested in a great introductory book on time series forecasting should check out Rob Hyndman&#x27;s book which is freely available online. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.otexts.org&#x2F;fpp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.otexts.org&#x2F;fpp</a>