enw_complete_dates: Complete missing reference and report dates

In seabbs/epinowcast: Flexible Hierarchical Nowcasting

Complete missing reference and report dates

Description

Ensures that all reference and report dates are present for all groups based on the maximum and minimum dates found in the data. This function may be of use to users when preprocessing their data. In general all features that you may consider using as grouping variables or as covariates need to be included in the by variable.

Usage

enw_complete_dates(
  obs,
  by = NULL,
  max_delay,
  min_date = min(obs$reference_date, na.rm = TRUE),
  max_date = max(obs$report_date, na.rm = TRUE),
  timestep = "day",
  missing_reference = TRUE,
  completion_beyond_max_report = FALSE,
  flag_observation = FALSE
)

Arguments

obs	A data.frame containing at least the following variables: ⁠reference date⁠ (index date of interest), report_date (report date for observations), and confirm (cumulative observations by reference and report date).
by	A character vector describing the stratification of observations. This defaults to no grouping. This should be used when modelling multiple time series in order to identify them for downstream modelling
max_delay	The maximum number of days to model in the delay distribution. Must be an integer greater than or equal to 1. Observations with delays larger then the maximum delay will be dropped. If the specified maximum delay is too short, nowcasts can be biased as important parts of the true delay distribution are cut off. At the same time, computational cost scales non-linearly with this setting, so you want the maximum delay to be as long as necessary, but not much longer. Consider what delays are realistic for your application, and when in doubt, check if increasing the maximum delay noticeably changes the delay distribution or nowcasts as estimated by epinowcast. If it does, your maximum delay may still be too short. Note that delays are zero indexed and so include the reference date and max_delay - 1 other days (i.e. a max_delay of 1 corresponds to no delay). You can use check_max_delay() to check the coverage of a delay distribution for different maximum delays.
min_date	The minimum date to include in the data. Defaults to the minimum reference date found in the data.
max_date	The maximum date to include in the data. Defaults to the maximum report date found in the data.
timestep	The timestep to used. This can be a string ("day", "week", "month") or a numeric whole number representing the number of days.
missing_reference	Logical, should entries for cases with missing reference date be completed as well?, Default: TRUE
completion_beyond_max_report	Logical, should entries be completed beyond the maximum date found in the data? Default: FALSE
flag_observation	Logical, should observations that have been imputed as missing be flagged as not observed?. Makes use of enw_flag_observed_observations() to add a .observed logical vector which indicates if observations have been imputed. This vector can then be passed to the observation_indicator argument of enw_obs() to control if these observations are used in the likelihood. Default: FALSE

Value

A data.table with completed entries for all combinations of reference dates, groups and possible report dates.

See Also

Preprocessing functions enw_add_delay(), enw_add_max_reported(), enw_add_metaobs_features(), enw_assign_group(), enw_construct_data(), enw_extend_date(), enw_filter_delay(), enw_filter_reference_dates(), enw_filter_report_dates(), enw_flag_observed_observations(), enw_impute_na_observations(), enw_latest_data(), enw_metadata(), enw_metadata_delay(), enw_missing_reference(), enw_preprocess_data(), enw_reporting_triangle(), enw_reporting_triangle_to_long()

Examples

obs <- data.frame(
  report_date = c("2021-10-01", "2021-10-03"), reference_date = "2021-10-01",
  confirm = 1
)
enw_complete_dates(obs)

# Allow completion beyond the maximum date found in the data
enw_complete_dates(obs, completion_beyond_max_report = TRUE, max_delay = 10)

seabbs/epinowcast documentation built on Feb. 3, 2025, 9:56 p.m.