Transaction data and attribute-value data

Magnum Opus can be applied to two distinct types of data: transaction data and attribute-value data.

Transaction data consists of collections of items.  A typical example is market basket data, where each transaction is the collection of items purchased by a customer in a single transaction. Such data can also be augmented by additional 'items' describing the customer or the context of the transaction.

Attribute-value data is a collection of cases, each described by a number of attributes.  Each case has a single value for each attribute.  Attributes may be categorical or numeric.  A typical example is a customer database.  In this example the cases are customers.  Attributes might include amount spent in each of a store's departments, behavioral information, and socio-economic descriptors.

Transaction data can be imported from two different file types, identifier-item files and item list files.

Each set of attribute-value data must be described by two files, a names file and a data file.