Divide a Group of Dates into 2 Groups (so you can tell if the business measurement is getting better or worse)

Author's Note:  This is an interesting technique but I believe a simpler and more general purpose method is in a blog post from Aug 2016. Search on "QlikView Maven Is My KPI Getting Worse or Getting Better"


I did a weekend project several weeks ago where I was working with a database containing some business measurements taken each day over a long stretch of time. I wanted an easy way to visualize whether the aggregate measurements were getting better or worse over time. In order to satisfy the “easy” part of that objective, I decided to build expressions that would automatically split the available measurement dates into two groups:  the earliest half of the dates and the latest half of the dates. That would allow me to create charts with a heat map feature that easily identifies areas for further investigation.

I won’t complicate this story with details of the business measurements or with details of how to create heat map colors (for more info, search for “QlikView Colormap Wizard”). We’ll call the measurement sorg_delta and do a Sum of those values over the dates.

I made a simplifying assumption that I would always have a contiguous span of dates. So, calculating the median date would give me the middle date that splits the group of dates into the two half groups that I need. Using set analysis syntax to make the sum function operate over the early half of the dates looks like this:

 Sum({<MDate={'<=$(=Date(median(MDate)))'}>} sorg_delta)

But, I can’t do something a simple as that for the other half of the dates because I may be working with an odd number of days and any comparison of the data must be done for the same number of measurements otherwise it would affect a comparison of the aggregate business measurement between the two groups. So, the other half of the expression that includes the later half of the dates looks like this:

Sum({<MDate={'>$(=Date(median(MDate)+if(odd(count(distinct MDate)),1,0)))'}>} sorg_delta)

The complete expression used in my charts subtracted the sum of earlier date measurements from the sum of later date measurements. Whether that difference is a positive or negative number tells whether the business measurement is getting “better” or “worse” and the size of the difference tells us how much better or worse the measurement has become. That logic was used with a heat map feature to color bars in a graph either reddish or greenish and it helped turn a simple bar graph into a relatively simple-to-understand multivariate analysis chart.
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