effectiveness / averted / etc functionality

[pearsonca]

Typical scenario comparison problem looks like:

• have a bunch of scenarios, grouping on different elements, with time series of outcomes (some times long format, i.e. two column of outcome and val; sometimes wide on outcome1, outcome2, ...), replicated
• a subset (often single element, but not necessarily) of those represent the reference case(s)
• we want to compute the matched differences of the outcomes
• in a variety of ways (averted, relative averted i.e. effectiveness, cumulative versions of previous, cumulative from a particular point in time)

Desired interface:

• need data.table + scenario key + replication key + reference scenario identifier + outcome identifier + desired calcs
• typical calculations should just be implemented
• want: support for some custom additional calculations
• want: variable time resolution output (i.e., if input is daily time series, support weekly / monthly / yearly / etc time series outputs)
• want smart imputing of input needs elements (e.g. from data.table key, date for date, check for a value column => long format)
• want data.table-like interface
• want quantile.data.table-ready output (as this is typical next step)

[pearsonca]

• reference identifier has to be a 1 to M key of scenario key (with M potentially 1, but generally allowed to be > 1).
• want: an auxilary function that will take a scenario table, with key, dimension 1, dimension 2, ..., etc columns and then receive a grouping statement (defining how to distinguish reference scenarios) which will extract the 1 to M relationships