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I looked at Prophet a few months ago because we needed a fire-and-forget library similar to 'auto.arima' (R "forecast" package) for Python, but no good candidates existed.

However I found Prophet to be computationally a little heavier than auto.arima because it uses "stan" (Bayesian) underneath, which in turn uses an MCMC type approach and has quite a few dependencies. We needed fast model retraining as well, and at the time, it didn't seem like that was something it excelled at. (might have changed, I'm not sure)

I ended up putting together a simple ensemble forecast model class with "statsmodels" which automatically selected/averaged the best models over a collection of model types via heuristics and cross-validation. It works ok, but I'm still waiting for someone to port the R auto.arima over to Python. (I tried rpy, which in theory should have worked, but I struggled with the impedance mismatch)




I found this port of auto-arima for Python. I haven’t used it in production, but it was easy to test on some demo data. https://pypi.org/project/pyramid-arima/


Thanks, I'll take a look.


You only need to do MCMC if you want simulated confidence intervals, it doesn't do anything for model estimation.


You’re right. It uses Stan to do MAP for model estimation and HMC for (optional) computation of confidence intervals. [1]

Thanks for the correction.

I need to look at Prophet again. Maybe it will work for fast model retraining. I had trouble the last time I tried it.

[1] https://research.fb.com/prophet-forecasting-at-scale/




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