Forecasting Time Series Data in R | Facebook's Prophet Package 2017 & Tom Brady's Wikipedia data

An example of using Facebook's recently released open source package prophet including,
- data scraped from Tom Brady's Wikipedia page
- getting Wikipedia trend data
- time series plot
- handling missing data and log transform
- forecasting with Facebook's prophet
- prediction
- plot of actual versus forecast data
- breaking and plotting forecast into trend, weekly seasonality & yearly seasonality components

prophet procedure is an additive regression model with following components:
- a piecewise linear or logistic growth curve trend
- a yearly seasonal component modeled using Fourier series
- a weekly seasonal component

forecasting is an important tool related to analyzing big data or working in data science field.

R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, and is widely used by both academia and industry. R software works on both Windows and Mac-OS. It was ranked no. 1 in a KDnuggets poll on top languages for analytics, data mining, and data science. RStudio is a user friendly environment for R that has become popular.