Re: st: Number of people present by date and time

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

Each observation is, I gather, a patient. One technique is to make
each observation an arrival or departure. For a very simple toy
dataset with just times for one day:

. l

     +-----------------------+
     | arrival   depart   id |
     |-----------------------|
  1. |    1000     1100    1 |
  2. |    1030     1200    2 |
  3. |    1230     1300    3 |
     +-----------------------+

. expand 2
(3 observations created)

. bysort id : gen inout = cond(_n == 1, 1, -1)

. by id : gen time = cond(_n == 1, arrival, depart)

. sort time

. l

     +--------------------------------------+
     | arrival   depart   id   inout   time |
     |--------------------------------------|
  1. |    1000     1100    1       1   1000 |
  2. |    1030     1200    2       1   1030 |
  3. |    1000     1100    1      -1   1100 |
  4. |    1030     1200    2      -1   1200 |
  5. |    1230     1300    3       1   1230 |
     |--------------------------------------|
  6. |    1230     1300    3      -1   1300 |
     +--------------------------------------+

. gen present = sum(inout)

. l, sep(0)

     +------------------------------------------------+
     | arrival   depart   id   inout   time   present |
     |------------------------------------------------|
  1. |    1000     1100    1       1   1000         1 |
  2. |    1030     1200    2       1   1030         2 |
  3. |    1000     1100    1      -1   1100         1 |
  4. |    1030     1200    2      -1   1200         0 |
  5. |    1230     1300    3       1   1230         1 |
  6. |    1230     1300    3      -1   1300         0 |
     +------------------------------------------------+

This is only one trick, and others will depend on your data. For
example, if your clinic is only open daily, you may be able to, or
need to, exploit that. If patients can come to a clinic more than once
a day  that will provide a complication.

All told, you should not need loops here. The two keys are likely to
be (1) the best data structure (2) heavy use of -by:-.

Nick

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 1:35 PM, Simon <scmoore.lists@googlemail.com> wrote:

> Dear Statalist,
>
> This is quite possible a rather naive question, but for some reason I am
> stuck.
>
> I have data from a clinic. I have the time each patient checks in
> (arrdatetime), the time they leave (depdatetime) and the time taken to
> first consultation (waittime) in minutes. What I would like to do is
> compare the number of people in the clinic for each patient at
> arrdatetime with waittime.
>
> So far the best I can come up with is to write a loop, going through
> every patients' arrdatetime and counting up those whose arrival and
> departure times span this value. But I have rather a lot of data and
> this seems terribly inefficient.
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