Spine Group#

The default way to bring labels or prediction events is a label feature group: a regular feature group that holds the labels among its features, updated by a feature pipeline at a specific cadence.

Sometimes it is more convenient to provide the training events or entities in a Dataframe instead, when reading feature data from the feature store through a feature view. We call such a Dataframe a Spine as it is the structure around which the training data or batch data is built. In order to retrieve the correct feature values for the entities in the Dataframe, using a point-in-time correct join, some additional metadata apart from the Dataframe schema is necessary. Namely, the information about which columns define the primary key, and which column indicates the event time at which the label was valid. The spine Dataframe together with this additional metadata is what we call a Spine Group.

For example, in the following spine, we want to retrieve the features for the three locations, no later than the event time of each of the rainfall measurements, which is our prediction target:

A Spine Group does not materialize any data to the feature store itself, and always needs to be provided when retrieving features from the offline API. You can think of it as a place holder or a temporary feature group, to be replaced by a Dataframe in point-in-time joins.

When using the online API, it is not necessary to provide the spine, since the online feature store contains only the latest feature values, and therefore no point in time join is required, the label is not required, as the inference pipeline is going to compute the prediction and the primary key values are specified when calling the online API.

Prefer a label feature group where you can. A Spine Group adds complexity and pushes work onto the clients, which must supply the entities and their event times on every call, and it can only be the root or label feature group of a feature view. It is most appropriate for batch inference, where the set of entities to score is known only at request time.