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How do I create Filters from comparing dates (not usual factor with numerical values)??

I had an issue in pipeline algorithm that I would like to get the latest asof_date can do come comparison with a fixed date (e.g. today the simulation date) to create a filter. However I do not know a good way to do it.

For example:

from quantopian.pipeline.data.zacks import EarningsSurprises

def make_pipeline(context):  
          earn_date = EarningsSurprises.asof_date.latest  
          sim_date = get_datetime().date()  
          # create a filter to see if earning date is the same as sim_date  
          date_filter = earn_date.eq(sim_date)  
....

This will result in error like:

BadBinaryOperator: Can't compute Latest == date
There was a runtime error on line xxx.

My question is: since the asof_date is not a simple float, the earn_date (which comes from .latest attribute) is not a factor either?
and how could I build a filter from comparing the asof_date.latest with some datetime objects?

Appreciate the help. Thanks much.

3 responses

can somebody help? I'd think this is quite a common caseto handle, i must be missing something obvious.

Hello Marise,

Pipeline factors cannot be directly compared to datetime objects. However, you can pass asof_date factors to BusinessDaysSincePreviousEvent to determine the window length between the current day in the simulation and the asof_date factor. In code, that would look like this:

    earn_date = BusinessDaysSincePreviousEvent(  
        inputs=[EarningsSurprises.asof_date]  
    )  
    date_filter = earn_date <= 1  

You can find a full example that uses fundamentals data in our sample algorithms library.

I hope this helps.

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Thanks Ernesto, this is very helpful!