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HarryS
Helper I
Helper I
Partially syndicated - Outbound

Identifying statistical causes of percentage change in a rate

Hi there, as usual I have searched for this across the forum so apologies if it has been answered elsewhere but I can't find it.

I suspect this is more of a stastistics question than a Power BI one, but as I am using Power BI I'll need to write it in DAX anyway.

 

The basic premise is:

 

The company I work for measures total instances and outcomes. To simplify things, these outcomes are 'Good' and 'Bad'. We then calculate a 'Good outcomes rate', i.e. Good outcomes/instances. This rate is tracked over numerous locations and services, so we look at things such as the YTD Good outcomes rate vs the 5 year mean Good outcomes rate, displayed as percentage point differences. 5 year mean in this case is the previous 5 years, not including the current year.

 

E.g. 

2021/22 YTD GOR5 YM GOR% Point diff
73.5%76.9%-3.4

 

This is where it gets tricky, because in reality we are measuring this rate across hundreds of categories (and indeed subcategories), with varying numbers of instances (i.e. some have a high number of instances, some very few). As a mocked up example:

 

CategoryInstancesGood outcomesGOR

A

29820067.1%
B

2001

182091.0%
C4500367981.8%
D97276979.1%
E1099889.9%
F15320.0%
G2270210492.7%
H1865169991.1%
Total120301037286.2%

 

As you can see, with this set up you may get quite big fluctuations in individual categories. What I want to calculate is a way of accounting for the differences in volume of incidents/good outcomes, so that I can understand how much each category actually contributes to changes in the overall rate. So, if the overall good outcome rate has decreased by 3 percentage points, I would like to establish that -0.4 of that change came from category G, and category F contributed -0.9 etc. 

Obviously we can tell, roughly speaking, what is contributing the most to changes in the rate (i.e. on the table above, we would pay more attention to categories C and G than F or E), but it would be amazing to have an automated process that could be plugged into a decomposition tree, with 'Change in GOR from the 5 year mean' as the value and the categories as the layers beneath, so that people in the organisation could see, numerically, which areas/categories were important/relatively unimportant. 

I hope this makes sense, thanks in advance if anyone can help.

4 REPLIES 4
HarryS
Helper I
Helper I

Syndicated - Outbound

Thanks - that looks like it would be worth a shot but I don't seem to have it (even though I've got the Jan 21 version). These are my standard visuals:

HarryS_2-1643299160700.png

 

And the preview options I have access to:

 

HarryS_1-1643299141261.png

 

Can't seem to download it independently anywhere either!

bcdobbs
Community Champion
Community Champion

Syndicated - Outbound

Not sure when it was brought in. Might be worth trying the December 21 release?

 

Are you running in Import mode (DirectQuery isn't supported)?



Ben Dobbs

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Syndicated - Outbound

Hi, yep running in import mode. Don't have the option to upgrade unfortunately as I work for a huge organisation with very limited opportunity to personalise my setup. I have asked IT about the Key Influencer visual but not optimistic.

bcdobbs
Community Champion
Community Champion

Syndicated - Outbound

Before getting into stats have you had a play with the key influencer visual?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/visuals/power-bi-visualization-influencers



Ben Dobbs

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