Prophet for Intermittent demand forecasting

[kasungayan]

Hi Devs,

I expect to apply prophet to forecast a collection of Intermittent time series. I understand that this issue has been raised before [1] [2], and identified that prophet is not ideal to use under these circumstances as it internally uses the Gaussian likelihood to model data. Preferably, prophet
must support other distributions, such as negative binomial or Poisson likelihood as indicated in [2].

My question is whether this issue has been already resolved/addressed in the recent releases ?. If not, any additional pointers to use prophet with Intermittent time series would be helpful.

Thanks,
Kasun.

[1] #1153

[2] #337

[bletham]

By "intermittent" do you mean small integer values with many 0s? If so, then there still isn't good support for that. If it's a continuous-valued time series that just has some pauses in it then there are other things that could be tried.

[kasungayan]

Hi @bletham,

Many thanks for the reply. Yes, time series with many '0' observations.

Regards,
Kasun.

[mmcmm]

What's in general many '0' observations? 30%, 40%, 50%? You could give this a try.

[kasungayan]

Hi @mmcmm ,

It has a high percentage of zeros, around 70%

Regards,
Kasun

[sujikathir]

Hi, I'm trying to predict the same with FBprophet. Did you get the results at last?

[kasungayan]

Hi @sujikathir ,

You can use Prophet for an intermittent time series, but don't expect encouraging forecast accuracy.

Thanks,
Kasun.

[bletham]

I think the only good option with Prophet would be to aggregate the data at a high enough level that they are no longer intermittent, and then forecast the aggregate. Of course that won't be possible in every setting if you require more granular forecasts.