5.2 Categorical

Categorical fields, also known as nominal fields, take a small number of pre-defined values or categories. The icon BigML uses to represent categorical fields is shown in Figure 5.2 .

When BigML processes a field that only takes two values (like 0 or 1), it automatically assigns the type categorical to the field.

BigML has a limit of 1,000 categories for each categorical field. When BigML detects a field with more than 1,000 categories, it automatically changes the type to text. If you are interested in modeling more categories in only one field, consider a BigML Private Deployment that allows the number of categories to be upgraded to tens of thousands.