In a real scenario, there are many different balances in the fields "checking account" and "saving account" in example 4 (Table 6). The probability that two customers have the same balance is rather low. Therefore a mining run with those numeric fields might be useless because the balance is part of the item name and almost each customer generates his own items.
To circumvent the problem of numeric fields, the Intelligent Miner® provides a discretization mechanism for numeric fields. If a numeric field contains more than 20 different values, the value range is divided in buckets. The number of buckets and the boundaries of the buckets are automatically determined by the mining algorithm. By default, 5 buckets are created. You can modify the default value on the Mining Settings page of the Associations properties or the Sequences properties.
[checking acccount: < -5000] [checking account: >= -5000 AND < 0] [checking account: >= 0 AND < 5000] [checking account: >= 5000 AND < 10000] [checking account: >= 10000 AND < 15000] [checking account: >= 15000 AND < 20000] [checking account: >= 20000 AND < 25000] [checking account: >= 25000 AND < 30000] [checking account: >= 30000 AND < 35000] [checking account: >= 35000 AND < 40000] [checking account: >= 40000]