Is there an easy way to calculate the Average date?

yes

TABLE FILE CAR
SUM AVE.SALES
BY COUNTRY
END

Please, it's a date calculation request!!!!

The average date between January 1 and January 3 is January 2.

select
to_date(date1, 'yyyy/mm/dd')
+ ((to_date(date2, 'yyyy/mm/dd')
- to_date(date1, 'yyyy/mm/dd')) / 2 )
from dual;

This will calculate the elapsed time between date1 and date2.

In this example, we used an ORACLE dummy table called DUAL.

We'll let Frank convert the above to WebFOCUS....


EDIT: TYPO

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Tom Flynn,

gweller

What do you want to infer from 'average date'?

The median (not average) date between January 1 and January 3 is January 2.

The mean date would be an arithmetic average and the mode date, the one that occurs most often.

2007/01/01 - 2 occurrence of date
2007/01/05 - 6 "
2007/01/06 - 8 "
2007/01/07 - 13 "

For this data, very roughly speaking, the median date would be the 2007/01/04, a date where nothing occurred. The Mean date would be 2007/01/06 and the mode date would be 2007/01/07. This is where you get the lies, damn lies and statistics from.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Alan B,

yes...

I thought DATE was a typo and he ment DATA....

Sorry, I will be more specific...

I have a table where we store document information by document type. I need a report that will tell me the average date received of the oldest 5 documents for each doc type

just have a sec so I don't have code, but your best bet would be to use date subtraction from a base date for each of the five days, calculate an average of those days elapsed, then add that number back to the base date. This should give you and "Average Date."

Convert the date to a number (like excel does) calculate the average of these numbers and convert the integer of the result back to a date (use the integer to prevent a date and time result)

To find the oldest five is an other challenge...

gweller,

It sounds like you still need to decide which average you want:

MEAN, MEDIAN, MODE or MIDRANGE?

Here's a web site that discusses the difference of the first three:

http://math.about.com/library/weekly/aa020502a.htm

Here are some basic definitions. All of these are referred to as the Average.

Mean is obtained by summing all elements of the data set
and dividing by the number of elements.

Mode is the data element which occurs most frequently.

Median is the middle element when the data set is arranged in order of magnitude.

Midrange is the arithmetic mean of the highest and lowest data elements.

Got these from:

http://www.andrews.edu/~calkins/math/webtexts/stat03.htm

... and rather than converting the date to a number, just use the WebFOCUS internal date format (i.e. YYMD or DMYY) as it is an offset from the base date and is, essentially, a number anyway ...

T

This sounds, to me, like an average age. Then just putting a date onto that age.

As an approach I would, rightly or wrongly, use something like:

DEFINE FILE VIDEOTRK
NEW_DATE/YYMD=TRANSDATE;
NOW_DATE/YYMD='&DATEYYMD';
DAYSOUT/I5= DATEDIF(NEW_DATE,NOW_DATE, 'D');
END
TABLE FILE VIDEOTRK
SUM MIN.NEW_DATE MAX.NEW_DATE MIN.DAYSOUT MAX.DAYSOUT AVE.DAYSOUT
COMPUTE DAYSBACK/I5=(AVE.DAYSOUT)*(-1);
COMPUTE AVE_DATE/YYMD=DATEADD(NOW_DATE, 'D',DAYSBACK);
BY PRODCODE
BY TOTAL LOWEST 5 TRANSDATE
END

I've left all the unnecessary fields in for testing.

Thanks to everyone for their input it Alan's solution worked...