May 31, 2024 — Snowflake ML Classification Update –— Preview

With this release, we are pleased to announce that the Classification function, which builds models that sort data into classes using patterns detected in your training data, has been updated with significant new features.

  • Support for timestamp features. The model automatically derives features such as day-of-week and month from timestamps, so classification can detect time-based cycles and use them to help classify new data.

  • Support for high-cardinality features and labels. These are short strings with more than about 100 values, such as job titles or fruits.

This change affects new classification models you create. Existing models continue to use the previous implementation. Due to the above improvements, a new model trained on the same data as an existing model will likely produce slightly different results than the existing model.

For more information, see Classification.