Predictive / AI-Driven Analytics

Prophet vs. ARIMA: Which Fits Your Data?

Compare model assumptions and features to pick the best forecaster for your series. Know when automatic seasonality and changepoints help versus when classic SARIMA shines.

Prophet is convenient when a series has multiple seasonalities and ______ built in.

only weekly seasonality

strictly stationary residuals

exogenous inputs only

holiday effects

Prophet models trend, multiple seasonalities, and holidays as additive components. ARIMA needs you to craft seasonal terms or regressors by hand.

Before fitting an ARIMA model to a non‑stationary series, a common step is ______.

Winsorizing outliers

one‑hot encoding

differencing the series

min‑max scaling

ARIMA assumes stationarity after differencing, so you typically difference to remove trend. Scaling or encoding doesn’t address unit‑root behavior.

Prophet handles structural breaks in trend using automatic ______ detection.

unit‑root

rank

cointegration

changepoint

Changepoints let Prophet vary trend slope with regularization. ARIMA/SARIMA typically assumes a single global trend after differencing.

In SARIMA, the seasonal period parameter m is the ______.

maximum AR order

number of exogenous features

length of the seasonal cycle

forecast horizon

m encodes the cycle length (e.g., 7 for daily with weekly seasonality). It is separate from AR and MA orders.

To include promotions or price as external drivers in ARIMA you would use ______.

pure ARMA without d

Prophet’s holiday component only

Holt‑Winters smoothing

ARIMAX/SARIMAX with exogenous variables

ARIMAX and SARIMAX accept exogenous regressors, letting the model account for non‑seasonal covariates.

In Prophet, adding a price index or marketing spend is done via ______.

add_changepoint

Box‑Cox lambda

auto_arima

add_regressor

Prophet supports additional user‑supplied regressors with add_regressor. They are included as linear terms alongside trend and seasonality.

For time‑series model validation, the preferred method is ______.

LOOCV without ordering

random k‑fold across all rows

rolling (time‑based) cross‑validation

shuffle‑split CV

Keeping temporal order avoids leakage. Rolling origin evaluation mimics real forecasting conditions.

Prophet expects timestamped rows on a regular grid; irregular gaps should be ______ first.

randomly shuffled

sorted by target value

resampled or filled to a uniform frequency

scaled to zero mean

Regular spacing ensures seasonality and trend components are well‑defined. Missing periods should be imputed or filled appropriately.

ARIMA residual diagnostics should resemble ______ if the model fits well.

white noise

periodic oscillations

a linear trend

heteroscedastic bursts only

Residuals should be uncorrelated with constant mean and variance; remaining structure suggests mis‑specification.

Compared with ARIMA, Prophet’s uncertainty intervals also reflect ______ uncertainty by default.

target scaling

calendar week numbers

trend changepoint

feature selection

Prophet accounts for uncertainty in changepoint placement when producing intervals, not just observation noise.

Starter

Good start—review core assumptions and diagnostics for each forecaster.

Solid

Nice work—fine‑tune changepoints, seasonality, and CV strategy.

Expert!

Excellent—confidently choose between SARIMA and Prophet for any series.

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