Forecasting Website Traffic Using Prophet Time Series Model

Abstract

Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a website and it has been the largest portion of Internet traffic. Internet traffic flow prediction heavily depends on historical and real-time traffic data collected from various internet flow monitoring sources. With the wide spread traditional traffic sensors and new emerging traffic sensor technologies, traffic data are exploding, and we have entered the era of big data internet traffic. Internet traffic management and control driven by big data is becoming a new trend. Although there have been already many internet traffic flow prediction systems and models, most of which use shallow traffic models and are still somewhat unsatisfying. This inspires us to reconsider the internet traffic flow prediction model based on deep architecture models with such rich amount of internet traffic data. ARIMA is a existing forecasting technique that predicts the future values of a series based entirely on its own inertia. Existing traffic flow prediction methods mainly use simple traffic prediction models and are still unsatisfying for many real-world applications. Now we proposed the prophet time series model to forecasting website traffic.