Prophet
Prophet is an open-source forecasting library developed by Facebook (now Meta) for time series data, designed to handle trends, seasonality, and holidays with ease. It uses an additive regression model and is particularly effective for business forecasting applications with daily observations that show strong seasonal patterns. The library is built on top of Stan for Bayesian inference and provides a simple, intuitive API in Python and R.
Developers should learn Prophet when they need to perform time series forecasting for business metrics like sales, website traffic, or inventory demand, especially with data that has multiple seasonality (e.g., daily, weekly, yearly) and holiday effects. It is ideal for scenarios where quick, robust forecasts are required without deep statistical expertise, as it automates much of the model tuning and handles missing data and outliers well. Use cases include retail sales prediction, energy consumption forecasting, and financial planning.