dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Robin Martens <martens@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Jason,

To pick up the point again, there's an additional question I've been looking at.

Even if disaggregated indicator reporting is burdensome (as you explain below), it is sometimes necessary for correct aggregated indicator calculations (the most obvious one the use of weighted averages) to have "intermediary calculations" according to dimensions in the indicator calculation, which can then be aggregated over the whole table to obtain the total aggregated indicator value. Even in these intermediary calculations, however, the data is not available for calculation, returning zero as a result.

The conclusion is that the current way of indicator calculation not only complicates (if not makes impossible in many cases) calculation of indicators per custom dimension, but also making impossible the correct calculation of indicators over period and orgunit dimension when any intermediary calculation over custom dimensions is necessary.

Can you confirm this?

If true, is it hard to modify the calculation method to simply pick the one-level-higher value of a data element whenever no disaggregated value exists? With existing I don't mean NULL or zero, but rather not defined (the dimension does not exist).

Robin

From: Jason Pickering [mailto:jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 10 September 2014 17:55
To: Robin Martens
Cc: Lars Helge Øverland; dhis2-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:dhis2-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; dhis2-devs
Subject: Re: [Dhis2-devs] DHIS2 - Indicator calculation over dimensions

Hi Robin,
It has been a discussed, and certainly not a bug. See a related thread here (https://lists.launchpad.net/dhis2-devs/msg27571.html) for a similar discussion on validation rules. It is essentially the same as indicators. What you will have to do is to create seperate indicator for each and every combination which you need. It can be painful, but the only way really which I know at the moment.

Feel free to file a blueprint here. https://blueprints.launchpad.net/dhis2

Regards,
Jason


On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 5:37 PM, Robin Martens <martens@xxxxxxx<mailto:martens@xxxxxxx>> wrote:
Dear all,

I've been testing the indicator calculation algorithm and noticed something particular of which I'm not sure if it's a bug or a deliberate development choice.

Indicators are not explicitly defined per category such as data elements but the reporting tools allow a disaggregated indicator calculation, which is definitely very useful. In a specific example, I want to know how many people were vaccinated this year and I have 3 kinds of vaccinations: A, B, and C. I have two data elements: the total population and the national vaccination levels (in %), with a custom category "vaccination type" which can be A, B, or C.

My indicator would be "total population" x "national vaccination level (total)". That works fine when put in a pivot table.

However, when trying to disaggregate the indicator calculation by adding my custom category to the pivot table, I don't have any values anymore. It seems the reason is that the "total population" data element does not have the "vaccination type" category (which seems logical) and therefore isn't found by the calculation algorithm. As a result, my table is empty. It seems useful that the algorithm would take the aggregated value (for population) available in such cases.

Another example is over the period dimension: my population is a yearly value, so when calculating an indicator on a monthly basis, instead of taking the available yearly value, he takes zero.

So my question: is this a deliberate choice in the development, a bug, or an idea for a future system improvement?

Kind regards,

Robin



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Jason P. Pickering
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