Rodrigo Agundez looks at Prophet, Facebook’s new API for store sales forecasting:
The data is of a current client, therefore I won’t be disclosing any details of it.
Our models make forecasts for different shops of this company. In particular I took 2 shops, one which contains the easiest transactions to predict from all shops, and another with a somewhat more complicated history.
The data consists of real transactions since 2014. Data is daily with the target being the number of transactions executed during a day. There are missing dates in the data when the shop closed, for example New Year’s day and Christmas.
The holidays provided to the API are the same I use in our model. They contain from school vacations or large periods, to single holidays like Christmas Eve. In total, the data contains 46 different holidays.
It looks like Prophet has some limitations but can already make some nice predictions.