Prophet: Automatic Forecasting Procedure • Hacker News Board

Re: Prophet: Automatic Forecasting Procedure

#31

Post by SpaceManNabs » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 8:47 PM UTC

Pandabob wrote: post #22

SpaceManNabs wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are the primary audience. Time series forecasting with deep learning is fraught with inconsistency. Someone on r/ML went pretty hard on detailing a survey and the stuff that was SOTA 10 years ago still is. Wish I saved that thread. The dude was well published. edit: found it https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/pe1lst/r_i... Turns out it was about time series anomaly detection, but if you can detect,…

When was this? I might go chasing this lead down, but even a fuzzy estimation of when would help. Will come link it here if I find it.

I updated my comment!

Re: Prophet: Automatic Forecasting Procedure

#32

Post by SpaceManNabs » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 8:49 PM UTC

isaacfung wrote: post #28

SpaceManNabs wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are the primary audience. Time series forecasting with deep learning is fraught with inconsistency. Someone on r/ML went pretty hard on detailing a survey and the stuff that was SOTA 10 years ago still is. Wish I saved that thread. The dude was well published. edit: found it https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/pe1lst/r_i... Turns out it was about time series anomaly detection, but if you can detect,…

These may be related. https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/comments/11vzjhi/statis... https://www.reddit.com/user/eamonnkeogh/submitted/?sort=top

I updated my comment with the thread but it was actually about time series anomaly detection. Turns out it was the same dude in your second link, and your comment includes forecasting in the first link as well. Thank you!

Re: Prophet: Automatic Forecasting Procedure

#33

Post by loehnsberg » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

From my own experience, a properly cross-validated lasso regression over a wide range of autoregressive features beats FB Prophet by a good margin and offers nearly the same degree of automation.

Re: Prophet: Automatic Forecasting Procedure

#34

Post by atwoodjw » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 9:11 PM UTC

Prophet is a PITA to install with PyPy on Apple Silicon. Beware.

Re: Prophet: Automatic Forecasting Procedure

#35

Post by philjohn » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 9:11 PM UTC

eep_social wrote: post #20

ttt333 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I've tried using it for pretty straightforward time series forecasts, and I struggled to make it into something useful in a business context. I'll disclaim that I'm just a finance dude and not a data scientist or programmer. But the documentation leads me to believe that I am in the target audience. I felt like I could grasp the basic mechanics after reading the paper, but I wish the documentation could help som…

This looks to me like something they’d be using for internal capacity planning. If so, they’d be asking it questions like, “how much capacity do we build out for the upcoming holiday rush?” I wouldn't be surprised if financial datasets are very noisy compared to service capacity metrics. I didn’t read the paper though, maybe this is addressed and maybe I’m wrong about the use case! But stuff like the below from the d…

Also perhaps anomaly detection in a metric.

Re: Prophet: Automatic Forecasting Procedure

#36

Post by whimsicalism » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 9:13 PM UTC

Time series forecasting is not at all solved. Prophet does not solve it for you.

Re: Prophet: Automatic Forecasting Procedure

#37

Post by ipaddr » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 9:16 PM UTC

Facebook developers are doing some really great stuff. For some reason it doesn't translate into a really great facebook or instagram. The experience is worse compared to 10 years ago. If they hired 10,001 of the best developers not working at facebook I think their products would be the same or worse. Is there a single person responsible for the vision?

Re: Prophet: Automatic Forecasting Procedure

#38

Post by simonhughes22 » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 9:24 PM UTC

Wondering how many people are now downloading this and other libs like Dart and trying to do stock market prediction or crypto price forecasting. Most of the devs i know, myself included, have dabbled in coding up trading algorithms at some point in time.

Re: Prophet: Automatic Forecasting Procedure

#39

Post by dang » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 9:53 PM UTC

Related. Others?

Zillow, Prophet, time series, and prices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29137200 - Nov 2021 (143 comments)

Is Facebook's “Prophet” the time-series Messiah or just a naughty boy? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27695574 - July 2021 (78 comments)

Re: Prophet: Automatic Forecasting Procedure

#40

Post by esafak » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 10:06 PM UTC

davmre wrote: post #29

Prophet has gotten a lot of attention since being released in 2017, I think because the idea of a fully automatic solution is very appealing to people. One of the original developers, Sean Taylor, recently posted a nice retrospective on the project's successes and failures: https://medium.com/@seanjtaylor/a-personal-retrospective-on-... He quotes one of his earlier tweets: If I could build it again, I’d start with au…

You mention classical models but Bayesian deep learning is a thing too. One can even retrofit existing DL models to obtain uncertainty estimates, at the expense of increasing (possibly doubling) the number of model parameters.

The quality of the uncertainty estimates is a question though.