All I Want for Christmas is You
Every year someone notices Google Trends rising for “All I Want for Christmas is You”. It signals the start of the Christmas period for some. How high will it get this year?
Rather than forecast the Google Trend (complicated because the whole scale will be redone if Christmas 2021 is bigger than previous years) let’s look at the amount of traffic to the All I Want for Christmas is You wikipedia page. This data is freely available from Toolforge
Given this data from 2015 up until yesterday what will the pageviews forecast look like for this year?
Running the most basic Forecast Forge forecast looks like this:
There are a few good things here; the algorithm has clearly learned that something big happens in December and it isn’t doing anything too crazy like predicting negative values. But, it seems to me, that the algorithm is massively underestimating the scale of the “All I Want for Christmas is You”-mania that is likely to happen in 2021.
The above statement is partially me making a judgement call (I think it is possible but unlikely that the wikipedia page will see the lowest levels of traffic since 2015) ad partially me knowing that the default Forecast Forge algorithm will struggle to fit seasonalities as extreme as we see in the training data.
This kind of thing is a tradeoff that all machine learning approaches will have to make somewhere; the flexibility required to fit extreme seasonality like this would also allow the algorithm to overfit in other situations where there is random noise. Unfortunately I can’t just make a few easy tweaks behind the scenes to Forecast Forge and have it magically work for this forecast and all the others. So I’m going to have to get creative to improve things.
The first thing to do is to look at the chart and try to figure out what kind of seasonal pattern there is.
To me, it looks like there is two parts to it:
- A triangular “sawtooth” or sharksfin part that rises in a straigtish line starting roughly at the start of November (in green on the above chart)
- An extra massive spike on top of that a few days before Christmas
You can add regressor columns to help fit both of these patterns as long as the pattern is the same every year; to me, this looks fairly close to the truth for the sawtooth section, but less so for the extra spike.
You can easily add a sawtooth regressor by having an ascending count of days since November 1st. The count resets back to zero after December 25th and then starts again on November 1st the next year. The machine learning then makes sure that the slope of the sawtooth in the forecast is the best fit for the training data.
This looks much more like it! Now let’s add another regressor for the big spike. This is a bit more of a judgement call; I’ve added it just for December 24th and 25th but you could spread it out across more days. You could even do a “final week” sawtooth if that was a better fit for the data (the end result would be two sawtooths stacked on top of each other).
The forecast with this method is quite similar to with just the sawtooth but the extra regressor column allows for a slightly higher peak:
There is a bit more work that could be done here; Maria re-released her Merry Christmas album in 2019 which is probably why that year is so high and in 2020 she was in an Apple TV Christmas special. As far as I can figure out this will not be happening in 2021 although she has released a new collaboration with Khalid on November 5th.
My Predictions
Here is the output from the spreadsheet:
| Date | Prediction | Lower | Upper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-11-09 | 2701.5888 | 933.3499 | 4348.9477 |
| 2021-11-10 | 2682.6904 | 854.7259 | 4306.5129 |
| 2021-11-11 | 2242.9998 | 589.6002 | 3947.8674 |
| 2021-11-12 | 2789.1958 | 1155.4217 | 4406.2187 |
| 2021-11-13 | 2884.0697 | 1233.5695 | 4521.535 |
| 2021-11-14 | 2840.468 | 1175.7148 | 4467.9262 |
| 2021-11-15 | 2773.708 | 1131.5298 | 4453.812 |
| 2021-11-16 | 2905.6589 | 1245.4681 | 4539.7813 |
| 2021-11-17 | 2884.595 | 1224.1054 | 4577.9736 |
| 2021-11-18 | 2884.4741 | 1289.0322 | 4562.5815 |
| 2021-11-19 | 3054.9337 | 1390.5864 | 4709.1608 |
| 2021-11-20 | 3217.4772 | 1612.2704 | 4874.9197 |
| 2021-11-21 | 3265.6522 | 1632.845 | 4960.8326 |
| 2021-11-22 | 3314.3094 | 1619.6743 | 4993.7539 |
| 2021-11-23 | 3584.3009 | 1864.77 | 5178.3117 |
| 2021-11-24 | 3722.3373 | 2156.4043 | 5292.8001 |
| 2021-11-25 | 4384.6715 | 2814.9402 | 6022.6639 |
| 2021-11-26 | 4265.1745 | 2614.3949 | 5941.3971 |
| 2021-11-27 | 4635.4638 | 3060.204 | 6283.3784 |
| 2021-11-28 | 4901.2347 | 3226.3424 | 6635.7226 |
| 2021-11-29 | 5173.5339 | 3503.3519 | 6708.9453 |
| 2021-11-30 | 5669.1416 | 4109.9755 | 7399.4489 |
| 2021-12-01 | 6030.5107 | 4343.4766 | 7548.4478 |
| 2021-12-02 | 6425.1478 | 4789.5011 | 8058.7572 |
| 2021-12-03 | 6995.7313 | 5283.9031 | 8609.2387 |
| 2021-12-04 | 7556.4337 | 5908.5305 | 9160.5009 |
| 2021-12-05 | 7993.2462 | 6302.7588 | 9727.1532 |
| 2021-12-06 | 8413.3941 | 6848.6404 | 10127.1566 |
| 2021-12-07 | 9030.1956 | 7443.3617 | 10697.0961 |
| 2021-12-08 | 9483.0803 | 7868.2572 | 11107.7753 |
| 2021-12-09 | 9937.0423 | 8334.207 | 11471.425 |
| 2021-12-10 | 10532.8194 | 8867.4962 | 12239.714 |
| 2021-12-11 | 11083.2638 | 9405.8618 | 12767.5931 |
| 2021-12-12 | 11473.7037 | 9793.7552 | 13088.434 |
| 2021-12-13 | 11811.3794 | 10179.6077 | 13573.654 |
| 2021-12-14 | 12310.3101 | 10745.9551 | 13821.3437 |
| 2021-12-15 | 12611.304 | 10898.2507 | 14210.6269 |
| 2021-12-16 | 12881.3891 | 11313.0435 | 14636.3938 |
| 2021-12-17 | 13263.9547 | 11621.3222 | 14995.5465 |
| 2021-12-18 | 13575.0713 | 11911.9019 | 15199.5681 |
| 2021-12-19 | 13703.7888 | 12058.1878 | 15352.9095 |
| 2021-12-20 | 13761.4983 | 12084.2751 | 15449.1159 |
| 2021-12-21 | 13966.7143 | 12321.3525 | 15731.7209 |
| 2021-12-22 | 13964.9939 | 12298.5484 | 15571.1297 |
| 2021-12-23 | 13928.2702 | 12310.1036 | 15504.8029 |
| 2021-12-24 | 30545.7591 | 28752.9632 | 32184.656 |
| 2021-12-25 | 27777.4519 | 26100.9902 | 29496.8692 |
| 2021-12-26 | 5774.8394 | 4123.2926 | 7438.3634 |
| 2021-12-27 | 5413.7454 | 3782.4206 | 6990.3051 |
| 2021-12-28 | 5219.4467 | 3666.0143 | 6968.5325 |
| 2021-12-29 | 4841.2889 | 3146.788 | 6405.508 |
| 2021-12-30 | 4454.5088 | 2644.2621 | 6213.2783 |
| 2021-12-31 | 4691.3097 | 2973.0348 | 6339.3716 |
A quick, easier to check prediction; pageviews for the “All I Want For Christmas is You” wikipedia page will peak on 24th December close to 30k. I will check in again with how this is looking nearer the time and also show you some other forecasting methods.