Related observations: allow time to / time since / most recent / next in addition to a window of days

[danicahelb]

User support email from James Platts Mills (MAL-ED study team member): jp5t@virginia.edu

i would suggest adding to the related observations functionality -- not just by a window of days but "most recent" and "next" as well as potentially linking by month_ss.

An example. The micro_x.csv file links stool test results to episodes of diarrhea identified during twice-weekly surveillance -- the rule for this was any stool tested within 48 hours of a surveillance-identified episode of data was considered a diarrheal stool. at present, there is no way to link these at present on the site.

Another example. Let's say I want to know for each episode of diarrhea > 5 days the change in LAZ score over the subsequent three months. Related observations does not allow me to link,for each episode of diarrhea, the most proximate LAZ score, and then the one three months later. I would need to download the raw surveillance and anthro data to do this (and I think researchers should be able to download data, if we are serious about this).

[dmfalke]

This seems like a fairly high-level topic, so I'm not sure in which repo this belongs. I could move it to web-eda, but I wonder if we should have a holding place for issues like this, that are higher level and likely require lots of discussion.