P91Feature EngineeringAdvancedDiagnose18 min

Diagnose Training-Serving Skew in a Feature Pipeline

Diagnose an offline-to-online feature mismatch without confusing it with ordinary overfitting.

#diagnose#training-serving skew#feature pipeline

Scenario

A churn model has validation AUROC 0.84 but falls to 0.62 after deployment. Training defines `spend_30d` as purchases in the 30 days ending at each monthly snapshot. Online inference calculates calendar-month spend at 09:00 on the first day of the month and replaces missing purchases with 0; late events can arrive after the score.

Problem statement

Diagnose the likely failure and specify what must be made consistent between training and serving.

Your Task

  1. Compare feature definitions and timestamps.
  2. Identify window and missing-value mismatches.
  3. Distinguish skew from model overfitting.

Feature definitions

Training: events in [snapshot - 30 days, snapshot), missing = null Serving: calendar-month events through current date, missing = 0 Score time: first day, 09:00; late events arrive up to 24 hours later

Related Concepts

Feature parityPoint-in-time dataDeployment monitoring

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