Prophet (original) (raw)

Watch Introductory Video

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. It works best with time series that have strong seasonal effects and several seasons of historical data. Prophet is robust to missing data and shifts in the trend, and typically handles outliers well.

Prophet is open source software released by Facebook’s Core Data Science team. It is available for download on CRAN and PyPI.

2023 Update: We discuss our plans for the future of Prophet in this blog post: facebook/prophet in 2023 and beyond

Accurate and fast.

Prophet is used in many applications across Facebook for producing reliable forecasts for planning and goal setting. We’ve found it to perform better than any other approach in the majority of cases. We fit models in Stan so that you get forecasts in just a few seconds.

Fully automatic.

Get a reasonable forecast on messy data with no manual effort. Prophet is robust to outliers, missing data, and dramatic changes in your time series.

Tunable forecasts.

The Prophet procedure includes many possibilities for users to tweak and adjust forecasts. You can use human-interpretable parameters to improve your forecast by adding your domain knowledge.

Available in R or Python.

We’ve implemented the Prophet procedure in R and Python, but they share the same underlying Stan code for fitting. Use whatever language you’re comfortable with to get forecasts.