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Filter and Normalize FTS Funding Flows for Indicator Computation

Source: R/filter_flows_for_indicators.R
filter_flows_for_indicators.Rd

This utility function applies the standard set of preprocessing and filtering rules required when computing donor-, recipient-, or destination-level indicators from FTS (Financial Tracking Service) funding flow data.

Usage

filter_flows_for_indicators(flows, fromyear = 2020)

Arguments

flows

A tibble or dataframe containing FTS funding flows from OCHA API

fromyear

default 2020

Value

A tibble of cleaned and normalized flows suitable for all donor-, recipient-, destination-, and donor->recipient indicator functions. The returned dataset contains only incoming, non-parent, non-parked flows with numeric budget years.

Details

The FTS data model contains several elements—such as funding chains, boundaries, parent/child flows, and "parked" envelopes—that must be normalized prior to any aggregation. This function enforces the official FTS logic to ensure indicators are computed without double-counting or misclassification of funding flows.

Key filtering rules applied:

1. Boundary Filtering

Only incoming flows are retained. Incoming flows represent funding entering a boundary (e.g., affected country + year, appeal, donor-country-year). This is the standard FTS method for calculating donor contributions, and prevents contamination from:

  • Internal flows (money moving within the boundary)

  • Outgoing flows (money leaving the boundary)

  • Irrelevant flows (fully outside the boundary)

Boundary filtering ensures that only flows relevant to the selected analytical scope enter the indicator dataset.

2. Parent/Child Flow Deduplication

FTS allows funding flows to be "chained" to represent cascading funding (donor -> agency -> partner). Parent flows are typically high-level envelopes; child flows represent operational allocations.

This function:

  • Identifies parents by the presence of one or more childFlowIds.

  • Removes all parent flows from the dataset.

This prevents double-counting parent envelopes together with their child breakdowns and ensures only operational flows are used in indicator calculations.

3. Removal of "Parked" Flows

Flows with flowType == "Parked" represent undecided envelopes awaiting breakdown into child flows (e.g., large ECHO decisions or multi-year envelopes).

These should not be used for:

  • donor funding totals

  • donor–recipient relationships

  • sector or geographic alignment indicators

The function removes them entirely, relying instead on their child flows when available.

4. Budget Year Normalization

The budgetYear column is converted safely to numeric to support time-series indicators such as:

  • funding trends

  • relationship duration

  • consistency indices

Non-numeric and malformed values are converted to NA with warnings suppressed.

Warning

This function removes parent flows and parked envelopes by design. If users require indicators specifically about envelope-level commitments, they should apply a custom filter before calling this function.

Examples

nrow(flows)
#> [1] 22441
cleaned <- filter_flows_for_indicators(flows)
nrow(cleaned)
#> [1] 11496