1482965 - Decide on mitigation strategy for active_ticks in longitudinal

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Data Platform and Tools Graveyard :: Datasets: Longitudinal, enhancement)

Description

[bugzilla]

Per Bug 1482466, active_ticks is computed incorrectly for subsession_count >= 3, which is ~8% of pings. There are a number options for mitigation strategies for longitudinal, especially since we look at each client's pings in chronological order:
- The quickest fix to get us to a more-correct number is to use the scalar value whenever possible, which leaves us with only ~2-4% of pings affected on recent dates
- We could, theoretically, try to correct the active_ticks values as we walk through each clients' pings. This could, however, lead to strange and undesirable effects, however, in cases where we have shared profiles, etc.
- At the very least perhaps we should mark affected pings

Some inputs we need before making a decision re: how much work we should put into this, and how:
- How much does this issue affect data science workflows and decisions?
- The longevity of the Longitudinal dataset in its current iteration is in question -- how much longer do we anticipate supporting the job?
- How much work would it be to walk session pings for an attempted active_ticks correction?
- Would it make more sense to leave the current active_ticks column as-is and create a new column for corrected values?

Comment 1

[bugzilla]

ni? saptarshi re: How much does this issue affect data science workflows and analysis?

Comment 2

["Saptarshi Guha[:joy]"]

Personally, i use active ticks in main summary which i believe is not(much less?) affected ?
As for longitudinal i do not use it but others do. I'll add others to this bug.

Comment 3

[Ben Miroglio [:bmiroglio]]

Ditto sguha, I do not use longitudinal and use main_summary for most analysis.

Comment 4

[Su-Young Hong]

Ditto, I never use longitudinal anymore. Main summary is my main data source for analysis

Comment 5

[Tim Smith (inactive) 👨‍🔬 [:tdsmith]]

I have dashboards that use longitudinal not but not the active_ticks column; nulling the column would work for me.

Comment 6

[bugzilla]

Based on what folks are saying about usage, I'm declaring this a wontfix