5.5 Items

When a field contains an arbitrary number of items (categories or labels), BigML assigns the type items to it. Items are separated using a special separator that is configured independently of the CSV separator used to separate the rest of fields of the source. These types of fields are used mainly for Association Discovery.

The icon used by BigML to denote items fields is shown in Figure 5.10 .

A source can have multiple fields with items each one using a different items separator. Figure 5.11 shows an example of sources with three items fields. The first two use the “;” (semicolon) as items separator, and the third one uses the “|” (pipe) as items separator. Figure 5.12 shows how BigML recognizes them after being configured, using the panel described in Chapter 6 to set up a different separator for each field.

ID,Age,Gender,Marital
Status,Certifications,Recommendations,Courses,Titles,Languages,Skills
1,51,Female,Widowed,5,10,3,Student;Manager,French;English,JSON|Perl|Python|Ruby|Oracle;
2,47,Male,Divorced,5,10,6,Manager;CEO,English;German;Italian,MongoDB|Business
Intelligence|Linux|Oracle
3,19,Male,Married,0,0,0,Student,French,MongoDB|JSON|Web
programming
4,45,Male,Divorced,1,5,3,Engineer,German;English,Windows|MongoDB|Algorithm
Design|MySQL|Linux