2.4 Date-Time Fields

BigML expands each date-time field into up to eight numerical fields (e.g., day of the week, day of the month, etc. You can enable or disable automatic generation by switching the expand date-time fields option in the configure source menu. (See the section Date-time of the Sources with the BigML Dashboard [ 22 ] .) When disabled, potential date-time fields will be treated as either categorical or text fields.

These expanded fields are treated as numeric fields; therefore BigML computes the same statistics mentioned above for numeric fields (section 2.1 .) Figure 2.6 shows an example of two numeric fields generated from a date-time field. The first field focuses on the year; that is why the field type has YYYY bold faced, while the second is for the month. The bold face in the type of field column indicates the focus of the generated field.