BigML is able to automatically detect your field types (see image below) and classify them into the following categories:
- Numeric: fields with numbers.
- Categorical: fields that contain up to 1,000 distinct values (categories).
- Date-time: fields with dates, times or both together. These fields are automatically expanded into other fields (year, month, day, day of the week, hour, minute, second and millisecond). Please click here for a broader explanation of this expansion.
- Text: fields with words. You can adapt the text analysis of your dataset depending on your needs. Please read the documentation about this topic and discover all the options available.
- Items: fields with different categorical values per instance. BigML automatically detects them when they are separated by non-alphanumeric characters, however any single character can be a separator. These kinds of fields are usually found in transactional datasets containing a set of items which are typically used for Association Discovery method.