bupaR supports several strategies to zoom-out from too detailed activities. One option is to remove distinctions between similar activity types; changing them to a uniform name. A second option is to collapse activities that belong together as a sub process under a higher-level name. The first aggregation we call a “IS-A” aggregation and the second a “PART-OF” aggregation.

Is-a aggregation

As a simple example, consider the patients event data.

patients %>% 
    process_map()

In the hypothetical situation where we want to zoom out this process, we could say that both MRI SCAN and X-Ray are Scans. That is, a MRI SCAN is a Scan and a X-Ray is a Scan. As a result, we could perform a is-a aggregation. For this, we use the act_unite function, since we unite two or more activities. We will see that the 236 MRI Scans and 261 X-Rays are replaced with 497 Scans.

patients %>%
    act_unite(Scan = c("MRI SCAN","X-Ray")) %>%
    process_map()

Part-of aggregation

Another approach is to combine activities which are not simular, but belong together as part of a sub process. Suppose we would say that X-Ray, MRI Scan, and Blood test are part of the sub process “Testing”. We could collapse the occurence of these activities into a single activity. This can be achieved with the act_collapse function.

patients %>% 
    act_collapse(Testing = c("MRI SCAN","X-Ray","Blood test")) %>%
    process_map()

Recoding individual activities

Sometimes it is useful to recode individual activity levels, for instance when some typo’s are present, or when you want to give different labels a more uniform format. Individual recodings can be done using act_recode.

patients %>%
    act_recode("Check-in" = "Registration",
               "MRI Scan" = "MRI SCAN") %>%
    process_map()