Holt-Winters time series forecasting with statsmodels

Question

I tried forecasting with holt-winters model as shown below but I keep getting a prediction that is not consistent with what I expect. I also showed a visualizat

Answer 1

The main reason for the mistake is your start and end values. It forecasts the value for the first observation until the fifteenth. However, even if you correct that, Holt only includes the trend component and your forecasts will not carry the seasonal effects. Instead, use ExponentialSmoothing with seasonal parameters.

Here's a working example for your dataset:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from statsmodels.tsa.holtwinters import ExponentialSmoothing

df = pd.read_csv('/home/ayhan/international-airline-passengers.csv', 
                 parse_dates=['Month'], 
                 index_col='Month'
)
df.index.freq = 'MS'
train, test = df.iloc[:130, 0], df.iloc[130:, 0]
model = ExponentialSmoothing(train, seasonal='mul', seasonal_periods=12).fit()
pred = model.predict(start=test.index[0], end=test.index[-1])

plt.plot(train.index, train, label='Train')
plt.plot(test.index, test, label='Test')
plt.plot(pred.index, pred, label='Holt-Winters')
plt.legend(loc='best')

which yields the following plot: