Type

The type of measurement ("quantitative", "temporal", "ordinal", or "nominal") for the encoded field or constant value (datum). It can also be a "geojson" type for encoding 'geoshape'.

Vega-Lite automatically infers data types in many cases as discussed below. However, type is required for a field if: (1) the field is not nominal and the field encoding has no specified aggregate (except argmin and argmax), bin, scale type, custom sort order, nor timeUnit or (2) if you wish to use an ordinal scale for a field with bin or timeUnit.

Default value:

1. For a data field, "nominal" is the default data type unless the field encoding has aggregate, channel, bin, scale type, sort, or timeUnit that satisfies the following criteria:

• "quantitative" is the default type if (1) the encoded field contains bin or aggregate except "argmin" and "argmax", (2) the encoding channel is latitude or longitude channel or (3) if the specified scale type is a quantitative scale.
• "temporal" is the default type if (1) the encoded field contains timeUnit or (2) the specified scale type is a time or utc scale
• "ordinal" is the default type if (1) the encoded field contains a custom sort order, (2) the specified scale type is an ordinal/point/band scale, or (3) the encoding channel is order.

2. For a constant value in data domain (datum):

• "quantitative" if the datum is a number
• "nominal" if the datum is a string
• "temporal" if the datum is a date time object

Note:

• Data type describes the semantics of the data rather than the primitive data types (number, string, etc.). The same primitive data type can have different types of measurement. For example, numeric data can represent quantitative, ordinal, or nominal data.
• Data values for a temporal field can be either a date-time string (e.g., "2015-03-07 12:32:17", "17:01", "2015-03-16". "2015") or a timestamp number (e.g., 1552199579097).
• When using with bin, the type property can be either "quantitative" (for using a linear bin scale) or "ordinal" (for using an ordinal bin scale).
• When using with timeUnit, the type property can be either "temporal" (default, for using a temporal scale) or "ordinal" (for using an ordinal scale).
• When using with aggregate, the type property refers to the post-aggregation data type. For example, we can calculate count distinct of a categorical field "cat" using {"aggregate": "distinct", "field": "cat"}. The "type" of the aggregate output is "quantitative".
• Secondary channels (e.g., x2, y2, xError, yError) do not have type as they must have exactly the same type as their primary channels (e.g., x, y).

See also: type documentation.

Data type based on level of measurement