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Prophet: forecasting at scale

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Re: Prophet: forecasting at scale

#91
For us insurance/financial services folks, I would like to simply clarify that this is not the Sungard/FIS risk management platform that is also called Prophet! :D

I got really excited for a second. Actually, I'm still pretty excited about this even if it was something else entirely.

Re: Prophet: forecasting at scale

#92
post #2

So...How much will this do at forecasting stock prices? =) Very cool though --- I would be interested to dive into the methods they've implemented sometime in the near future!

It would probably perform pretty poorly as other has suggested. This is mainly due to the fact that stock prices by itself is a pretty non-stationary dataset/measurement. Most of these probabilistic models are poorly equipped to make accurate predictions for non-stationary data since it's trends are seemingly similar to noise.

Re: Prophet: forecasting at scale

#93
This is a nice piece of work - thanks for sharing with the community!

Some feedback: it'd be nice to see you actually quantify how accurate Prophet's forecasts are on the landing page for the project. In the Wikipedia page view example, you go as far as showing a Prophet forecast, but it'd be nice to have you take it one step further and quantify its performance. Maybe withhold some of the data you use to fit the model and see how it performs on that out of sample data. It's nice that you show qualitatively that it captures seasonality, but you make bold claims about its accuracy and the data to back those claims up is conspicuously absent. Related, it might be worth benchmarking its performance against existing automated forecasting tools.

I'll definitely be checking it out!

Re: Prophet: forecasting at scale

#94
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and if you like Clojure, you might try Bayadera, which has its own engine running the analysis on the GPU. http://github.com/uncomplicate/bayadera

This looks like it could be awesome but it has almost no information about what its purpose is or how to use it.

You are right. The docs have been due to be written for many months now, and that is the main reason the library has not been released yet. On the other hand, the test folder contains many tests, among them full examples from many chapters from the book Doing Bayesian Dara Analysis, recommended above.

Re: Prophet: forecasting at scale

#96
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks like it could be awesome but it has almost no information about what its purpose is or how to use it.

You are right. The docs have been due to be written for many months now, and that is the main reason the library has not been released yet. On the other hand, the test folder contains many tests, among them full examples from many chapters from the book Doing Bayesian Dara Analysis, recommended above.

Oh I see. That's cool! I do want to check it out but will probably wait for its release.

And I wait with bated breath.

Re: Prophet: forecasting at scale

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stan has a BSD core. Prophet must avoid the GPLv3 interfaces.

It doesn't avoid the R interface, which is GPL'd (version 3).

Smells like more Facebook licensing drama, something new this time instead of the revocable patent license!

Re: Prophet: forecasting at scale

#98

Worth noting Prophet is R/Python wrappers to some models with reasonable defaults, written in and fit by Stan , a probabilistic programming language, and Bayesian estimation framework. Stan is amazing in that you can fit pretty much any model you can describe in an equation (given enough time and compute, of course)! More on Stan here: http://mc-stan.org/

... and if you like Clojure, you might try Bayadera, which has its own engine running the analysis on the GPU. http://github.com/uncomplicate/bayadera

I'm pretty interested in this as I do most of my work on the JVM and I love trying this out on our stream processor at work.

Cloned and tried to build it but I'm getting an error regarding uncomplicate:commons:0.3.0-SNAPSHOT being unavailable on clojars. Is that something you currently have installed to your local maven repo? I don't see it here: https://clojars.org/repo/uncomplicate/commons/

I can get it to build with 0.2.2 but it is missing the "releaseable?" function.

In any case this looks awesome and I'll be keeping an eye on it / playing with it for some new projects.

EDIT: I was able to get it building by cloning your commons library and running "lein install". :)

Re: Prophet: forecasting at scale

#99
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know of any good beginner tutorials for Stan or probabilistic programming in general? All the examples that I found seemed quite complex and I was a bit overwhelmed by all the math. Which might also be a sign that I should brush up my math skills. What kind of math/stats should I revise to be able to better understand probabilistic programming?

Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, Second Edition: A Tutorial with R, JAGS, and Stan. It is very approachable and also has lots of practice problems. It's not a math-heavy book at all. Edit: I wouldn't recommend Probabilistic Programming and Bayesian Methods for Hackers. When I tried using it, I felt that too much was glossed over. The book that I recommend excels at conveying a strong intuition for how these various tech…

Doing Bayesian Data Analysis https://amzn.com/dp/B00PYZ2VR6/ ($65).

Free is hard to beat, especially for someone just testing the waters.

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