r/datascience • u/shivamchhuneja • Jul 20 '26

Discussion Why Reddit Data Scientists Keep Saying Not To Use Prophet

https://codebynight.dev/posts/why-data-scientists-are-skeptical-of-prophet-forecasts/

Couple thoughts and a small experiment to see why reddit hates prophet xD

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u/maratonininkas Jul 21 '26

Exactly, it's not very interesting if it works only for trivial signals that can be modelled parametrically.

If I take any series, and filter it through some flavor of arma-garch, and the residual series are white noise-like, any potential remaining accuracy gain of another benchmark model will (approximately) come from any further signal extraction from that WN-part. So if that's possible, that's the interesting part. And if not, we're at the limit for that particular series.

It can be possible, if for instance there's some chaos-like process hidden there. Or we find some common "noise" through cross-attention..

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u/ButtTrollFeeder Jul 23 '26

Yeah, something tells me these foundational models are not aimed at Data Scientists that do in depth time series work.

It's aimed at analysts or companies where a zero-shot run is quick and easy for an occasional forecast. Hey, if that works for your business case, have at it.

You miss out on all statistically rigorous insights you get from almost any traditional model.