The aggregation framework is a set of libraries and utilities that allows teams to flexibly compute aggregate (counting) features in both batch and in real-time. Aggregate features can capture historical interactions between on arbitrary entities (and sets thereof), conditional on provided features and labels.
These types of engineered aggregate features have proven to be highly impactful across different teams at Twitter.
The framework supports computing aggregate features on provided grouping keys. The only constraint is that these keys are sparse binary features (or are sets thereof).
For example, a common use case is to calculate a user's past engagement history with various types of tweets (photo, video, retweets, etc.), specific authors, specific in-network engagers or any other entity the user has interacted with and that could provide signal. In this case, the underlying aggregation keys are userId, (userId, authorId) or (userId, engagerId).
In Timelines and MagicRecs, we also compute custom aggregate engagement counts on every tweetId. Similary, other aggregations are possible, perhaps on advertiserId or mediaId as long as the grouping key is sparse binary.
Offline, we support the daily batch processing of DataRecords containing all required input features to generate aggregate features. These are then uploaded to Manhattan for online hydration.
Online, we support the real-time aggregation of DataRecords through Storm with a backing memcache that can be queried for the real-time aggregate features.
Additional documentation exists in the docs folder
The Home Timeline heavy ranker uses a varierty of both batch and real time features generated by this framework. These features are also used for email and other recommendations.