ecohealthalliance / open-rvfcast

Wellcome Open RVFCast project repository
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Fix/change approach to historical data handling in anomalies #64

Closed emmamendelsohn closed 1 year ago

emmamendelsohn commented 1 year ago

Currently we calculate anomalies using the mean of the lagged x days (0-30, 31-60, 61-90) and the historical mean for the present day of year. I realized we should probably take the mean of the historical means for the lagged time period. For example, if we're calculating an anomaly for a 61-90 day lag, we'd want the historical mean from the days of the year 61-90 days previous to the present date. Because we already have the historical means for each DOY pre-calculated, I think we can get away with using the mean of these means (as well as the means of the SDs when normalizing).

emmamendelsohn commented 1 year ago

That said, because we're calculating the anomalies relative to a fixed present day value, it probably wouldn't affect performance to use our current approach. It's just slightly more interpretable and explainable to do it as above?