from Hacker News

Show HN: HyperProphet – The Easiest Way Run FB Prophet at Scale

by anandology on 8/5/20, 4:38 PM with 2 comments

We are Anand and Raghav, the creators of HyperProphet (https://hyperprophet.com/), a tool to enable developers to compute thousands of forecasts in minutes using fbprophet without worrying about infrastructure.

Scaling forecast computation is a hard problem, often costs developers in productivity. Even established organizations spend a lot of time trying address this, but often the outcomes are not easy to use and manage[1][2].

We spent the last few years building a demand planning product for CPG and retail in which we had to forecast thousands of time-series. Computing such huge number forecasts in a reasonable time was a challenge. Facebook’s Prophet was one of our work-horse algorithms. Although Prophet made many things easy, it was still slow for a large dataset.

Speed was critical for quick experimentation. To improve the speed, we built a small library to run compute on AWS Lambda. Encouraged by the early results, we built an in-house service HyperProphet which we are sharing with you today.

The key features of HyperProphet are: - Fast: compute thousands of forecasts in minutes - Simple: switch from Prophet to HyperProphet by changing a couple of lines of code - Productive: experiment with forecasts in your notebooks without worrying about infrastructure

HyperProphet is in early beta, and we are looking for more people to try it and give us feedback.

We would love to see it used in diverse use cases and see how it performs. We see possible use-cases across multiple industries for capacity planning, anomaly detection, financial planning, among others.

If you have any thoughts, we’d love to hear them in the comments!

[1]: https://www.slideshare.net/MahanHosseinzadeh/prophet-at-scale-using-prophet-at-scale-to-tune-and-forecast-time-series-at-spotify

[2]: https://medium.com/walmartglobaltech/scaling-machine-learning-algorithms-fbprophet-xgboost-with-pyspark-on-w-mlp-405fadca1c19

  • by texasbigdata on 8/5/20, 9:26 PM

    Hi Anand and Raghav - great showcase!

    Just for curiosity, is the # of forecasts due to SKU/locations, or due to granularity of series (i.e. let's forecast absolutely every KPI driver, as well as on different time scales).

    Apologies if that's an low level question, the Walmart blog was relatively large in use case.

    Best of luck!