Indicators

Overview

As described in What is ChildCount+?, ChildCount+ collects data, runs analysis on those data, then generates reports and alerts based on the results of the analysis. The indicators functionality takes care of the simple data analysis that goes on inside of ChildCount+.

The data analysis features are centered around the idea of “indicators.” An indicator is a function that takes two arguments: a data set and a time period and returns a numerical value. For example, an indicator called “Number of Households” would take a list of patients and a time period as arguments, and would return an integer – the number of households heads in the patient list at the given time period – as output.

The standard interface for indicators provides a few benefits to the programmer:

  1. We can transparently cache indicator values.
  2. Aggregation is simple: the same indicator function can generate per-patient, per-CHW, per-village, and per-site values, depending on the patient (or other) list you provide as input.
  3. It is easy to reuse reporting code across indicators.

The indicators code lives in two places. The definition of the indicators interface is in a library directory: lib/indicator/ while the ChildCount+ indicator definitions live inside the ChildCount+ application directory: apps/childcount/indicators/.

Creating an Indicator

All of the ChildCount+ indicator code resides in the apps/childcount/indicators/ directory. For the most part, one indicator module (e.g., childcount.indicators.household directly corresponds to one ChildCount+ SMS form (e.g., +V or the childcount.forms.HouseholdVisitForm). To create a new indicator, you must add a new class to one of the files in apps/childcount/indicators/.

Warning

Calculating indicator values can be very nuanced and tricky. Please make sure to extensively test your indicator code before you deploy it.

For example, you might want to create an indicator that measures the number of households headed by people over the age of 50 (at the end of the time period). Since this indicator relates most directly to registration (the +NEW form), we would put it in the file apps/childcount/indicators/registration.py.

Warning

If your indicator returns a percentage value, make sure that your indicator class inherits from indicator.indicator.IndicatorPercentage. Using the percentage class will save you lots of time and will make caching your life easier!

Adding a time period

Since all indicators take a time period as an argument, ChildCount+ defines a standard set of time periods we can use for indicator and report generation. Every time period has a start and end datetime object, plus one or more sub-periods.

A time period might be “One Year” and the sub-periods might be each of the months of the year. These time periods are defined in apps/reportgen/timeperiods/definitions/.

To define a new time period, clone one of the files in apps/reportgen/timeperiods/definitions/, edit it to do what you want, and make sure to add it to the list of imports in apps/reportgen/timeperiods/__init__.py.

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