Formatting your input data

The files that you use to import data into Amazon Personalize must map to the schema that you are using.

Amazon Personalize imports data only from files that are in the comma-separated values (CSV) format. Amazon Personalize requires the first row of your CSV file to contain column headers. The column headers in your CSV file need to map to the schema to create the dataset. Don't enclose headers in quotation marks ("). TIMESTAMP and CREATION_TIMESTAMP data must be in UNIX epoch time format. For more information see Timestamp data.

Important

If your data includes any non-ASCII encoded characters, your CSV file must be encoded in UTF-8 format.

The following interactions data represents historical user activity from a website that sells movie tickets. You can use the data to train a model that gives a user movie recommendations based on the activities of other users.

USER_ID,ITEM_ID,EVENT_TYPE,EVENT_VALUE,TIMESTAMP
196,242,click,15,881250949
186,302,click,13,891717742
22,377,click,10,878887116
244,51,click,20,880606923
166,346,click,10,886397596
298,474,click,40,884182806
115,265,click,20,881171488
253,465,click,50,891628467
305,451,click,30,886324817
  

The associated Interactions schema is repeated below.

{
  "type": "record",
  "name": "Interactions",
  "namespace": "com.amazonaws.personalize.schema",
  "fields": [
    {
      "name": "USER_ID",
      "type": "string"
    },
    {
      "name": "ITEM_ID",
      "type": "string"
    },
    { "name": "EVENT_TYPE",
      "type": "string"
    },
    {
      "name": "EVENT_VALUE",
      "type": "float"
    },
    {
      "name": "TIMESTAMP",
      "type": "long"
    }
  ],
  "version": "1.0"
}

Amazon Personalize requires the USER_ID, ITEM_ID, and TIMESTAMP fields. USER_ID is the identifier for a user of your application. ITEM_ID is the identifier for a movie. EVENT_TYPE and EVENT_VALUE are the identifiers for user activities. In the sample data, a click might represent a movie purchase event and 15 might be the purchase price of the movie. TIMESTAMP represents the Unix epoch time that the movie purchase took place.

Timestamp data

Timestamp data, such as TIMESTAMP (for Interactions datasets) or CREATION_TIMESTAMP (for Items datasets) data, must be in Unix epoch time format in seconds. For example, the Epoch timestamp in seconds for date July 31, 2020 is 1596238243. To convert dates to Unix epoch timestamps use an Epoch converter - Unix timestamp converter.

Formatting explicit impressions

If you use the User-Personalization recipe, you can record and upload impressions data. Impressions are lists of items that were visible to a user when they interacted with (for example, clicked or watched) a particular item. To upload impressions data in a bulk data import, you manually record each item ID, separating the values with a vertical bar, '|', character as part of your historical interactions data. For more information on impressions data, see Impressions data.

The following is a short excerpt from an Interactions dataset that includes explicit impressions in the IMPRESSION column.

EVENT_TYPE	IMPRESSION	ITEM_ID	TIMESTAMP	USER_ID
click	73|70|17|95|96	73	1586731606	USER_1
click	35|82|78|57|20|63|1|90|76|75|49|71|26|24|25|6	35	1586735164	USER_2
...	...	...	...	...

The application showed user USER_1 items 73, 70, 17, 95, and 96 and the user ultimately chose item 73. When you create a new solution version based on this data, items 70, 17, 95, and 96 will be less frequently recommended to user USER_1.

Categorical data

To include multiple categories for a single item when you use categorical string data, separate the values using the vertical bar, '|', character. For example, to match the Items schema from the previous section using two categories, a data row would resemble the following:

ITEM_ID,GENRE
item_123,horror|comedy

After you format your data, upload it to an Amazon S3 bucket so you can import it into Amazon Personalize. For more information, see Uploading to an Amazon S3 bucket.