I have recently been using facebook's timeseries prediction package Prophet. Prophet add some much needed timeseries prediction power to python. It is simpler to use that statsmodels, the other major package in python for timeseries predictions, but this simplicity comes at a cost of obscuring what's going inside prophet. This post is my notes on understanding how Prophet works, and comes fom my own reading of the Prophet source code and accompanying paper.

If you've read the documentation around the package, there isn't much new here, but hopefully it will be of use to someone.

Let's start by making a prediction with Prophet. We'll do this using daily data from London's cycle hire scheme. We begin by loading this data