Updating features based on user actions in online systems

A computer-implemented method comprising:

• maintaining, by an online system, a cumulative feature store and one or more incremental feature stores, each of the cumulative and the incremental feature stores storing information describing features, each feature associated with a user, an entity represented in the online system, and a feature value based on user actions of the user associated with the entity;
• maintaining a status for each of the incremental feature stores, where an incremental feature store has a status of active;
• and
• repeating an update cycle for updating the cumulative feature store, the update cycle comprising:
• marking the incremental feature store as inactive,
• marking another incremental feature store as active,
• updating the feature values in the cumulative feature store based on a corresponding feature values in the inactive incremental feature store, and
• responsive to receiving information about one or more user actions performed using the online system during the update cycle, updating the feature values in the incremental feature store based on the received information,
• using the other incremental feature store as the incremental feature store for the next update cycle.

A computer program product having a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing computer-executable code, the code comprising:

• a feature manager module of an online system configured to:
• maintain a cumulative feature store and a pair of incremental feature stores, each of the cumulative and the incremental feature stores storing information describing features, each feature associated with a user, an entity represented in the online system, and a feature value based on user actions of the user associated with the entity;
• maintain a status for each of the incremental feature stores, where one of the incremental feature stores has a status of active and the other of the incremental feature stores has a status of inactive;
• and
• repeat an update cycle for updating the cumulative feature store, the update cycle comprising:
• swapping the statuses of the pair of incremental feature stores,
• updating the feature values in the cumulative feature store based on a corresponding feature values in the inactive incremental feature store, and
• responsive to receiving information about one or more user actions performed using the online system during the update cycle, updating the feature values in the active incremental feature store based on the received information.