How to pick the best Data Field Type

[Riot]

I am a begginer and working on the San Fran probelm from Kaggle for my Business Analytics class. 

I have managed to get my data pretty cleaned up, but when I submitted the Day, Month and Year individually (with help from this forum) my score actually got worse. I submitted them all as an INT16 but I really have no idea what most of them mean. I found a guide on the alteryx website, but the defenitions were beyond my knowledge. 

I guess my question is, what is the difference between the INTs, STRINGS and Double, and which one do you think would be best for using day, month and year as historical variables when trying to figure out what type of crime may have accoured on a given day. 

Thank you again for the help. 

[MarqueeCrew · Accepted solution]

Day - byte
Month - byte
Year - int16

My guess

[MarqueeCrew · Accepted solution]

Byte Number: A byte field is a positive whole number than falls within the range, 0 thru 255

http://help.alteryx.com/10.0/index.htm#Reference/DataFieldType.htm?Highlight=Data%20types

[Riot]

Thanks Sir, It improved my score, but I am still worse than my original, when I didnt do any data cleaning haha. Ill mess with it a bit tomorrow. 

Quick question though, I havent added the time into my decision tree. do you have any recomendations for a good data type for that ?