Moving averages with MongoDB's aggregation framework?

The agg framework now has $map and $reduce and $range built in so array processing is much more straightfoward. Below is an example of calculating moving average on a set of data where you wish to filter by some predicate. The basic setup is each doc contains filterable criteria and a value, e.g.

{sym: "A", d: ISODate("2018-01-01"), val: 10}
{sym: "A", d: ISODate("2018-01-02"), val: 30}

Here it is:

// This controls the number of observations in the moving average:
days = 4;

c=db.foo.aggregate([

// Filter down to what you want.  This can be anything or nothing at all.
{$match: {"sym": "S1"}}

// Ensure dates are going earliest to latest:
,{$sort: {d:1}}

// Turn docs into a single doc with a big vector of observations, e.g.
//     {sym: "A", d: d1, val: 10}
//     {sym: "A", d: d2, val: 11}
//     {sym: "A", d: d3, val: 13}
// becomes
//     {_id: "A", prx: [ {v:10,d:d1}, {v:11,d:d2},  {v:13,d:d3} ] }
//
// This will set us up to take advantage of array processing functions!
,{$group: {_id: "$sym", prx: {$push: {v:"$val",d:"$date"}} }}

// Nice additional info.  Note use of dot notation on array to get
// just scalar date at elem 0, not the object {v:val,d:date}:
,{$addFields: {numDays: days, startDate: {$arrayElemAt: [ "$prx.d", 0 ]}} }

// The Juice!  Assume we have a variable "days" which is the desired number
// of days of moving average.
// The complex expression below does this in python pseudocode:
//
// for z in range(0, size of value vector - # of days in moving avg):
//    seg = vector[n:n+days]
//    values = seg.v
//    dates = seg.d
//    for v in seg:
//        tot += v
//    avg = tot/len(seg)
// 
// Note that it is possible to overrun the segment at the end of the "walk"
// along the vector, i.e. not enough date-values.  So we only run the
// vector to (len(vector) - (days-1).
// Also, for extra info, we also add the number of days *actually* used in the
// calculation AND the as-of date which is the tail date of the segment!
//
// Again we take advantage of dot notation to turn the vector of
// object {v:val, d:date} into two vectors of simple scalars [v1,v2,...]
// and [d1,d2,...] with $prx.v and $prx.d
//
,{$addFields: {"prx": {$map: {
    input: {$range:[0,{$subtract:[{$size:"$prx"}, (days-1)]}]} ,
    as: "z",
    in: {
       avg: {$avg: {$slice: [ "$prx.v", "$$z", days ] } },
       d: {$arrayElemAt: [ "$prx.d", {$add: ["$$z", (days-1)] } ]}
        }
        }}
    }}

            ]);

This might produce the following output:

{
    "_id" : "S1",
    "prx" : [
        {
            "avg" : 11.738793632512115,
            "d" : ISODate("2018-09-05T16:10:30.259Z")
        },
        {
            "avg" : 12.420766702631376,
            "d" : ISODate("2018-09-06T16:10:30.259Z")
        },
        ...

    ],
    "numDays" : 4,
    "startDate" : ISODate("2018-09-02T16:10:30.259Z")
}

The way I would tend to do this in MongoDB is maintain a running sum of the past 90 days in the document for each day's value, e.g.

{"day": 1, "tempMax": 40, "tempMaxSum90": 2232}
{"day": 2, "tempMax": 38, "tempMaxSum90": 2230}
{"day": 3, "tempMax": 36, "tempMaxSum90": 2231}
{"day": 4, "tempMax": 37, "tempMaxSum90": 2233}

Whenever a new data point needs to be added to the collection, instead of reading and summing 90 values you can efficiently calculate the next sum with two simple queries, one addition and one subtraction like this (psuedo-code):

tempMaxSum90(day) = tempMaxSum90(day-1) + tempMax(day) - tempMax(day-90)

The 90-day moving average for at each day is then just the 90-day sum divided by 90.

If you wanted to also offer moving averages over different time-scales, (e.g. 1 week, 30 day, 90 day, 1 year) you could simply maintain an array of sums with each document instead of a single sum, one sum for each time-scale required.

This approach costs additional storage space and additional processing to insert new data, however is appropriate in most time-series charting scenarios where new data is collected relatively slowly and fast retrieval is desirable.