Feature Store Design Patterns for Churn Prediction: Integrating Real-Time and Batch Feature Computation at Scale

Abstract

Customer churn prediction requires computing and delivering timely, accurate, and consistent features from both long-term historical data and dynamically changing real-time interactions. Traditional machine learning pipelines struggle to combine heterogeneous temporal signals due to feature staleness, training-serving inconsistencies, and computational constraints of large-scale temporal operations. This paper establishes a comprehensive theoretical framework for feature store design patterns that seamlessly integrate batch and streaming computation for scalable churn prediction. The framework synthesizes temporal feature engineering, dual-path computation models, incremental materialization, point-in-time correctness, and information-theoretic constraints on prediction accuracy. Theoretical analysis demonstrates the impact of staleness on information retention, the computational complexity of aggregation operations, and the storage requirements across raw logs, snapshots, and materialized features. Results indicate that abstracted definitions of features remove batch-stream drift, real-time freshness brings about predictive power at a decreasing ratio after reaching some particular limits, and incremental updating mechanisms are considerably less costly than complete recalculation.