---
title: "Part 1: Feature Engineering"
description: "Set up a feature store with Aerospike and explore how its four objects work together."
---

# Part 1: Feature Engineering

> For the complete documentation index see: [llms.txt](https://aerospike.com/docs/llms.txt)
> 
> All documentation pages available in markdown.

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Data engineers and ML practitioners familiar with Python and basic Spark concepts.
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This tutorial should take between 5 and 10 minutes.
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## Objectives

By the end of this tutorial, you will be able to:

-   Understand what a feature store is and why it solves data consistency problems in ML workflows.
-   Explore the four main feature store objects: Feature Groups, Features, Entities, and Datasets.
-   See how the feature store maps to Aerospike sets and records in a ride-hailing application.

A ride-hailing platform’s smart dispatch system needs to predict which driver is most likely to accept a given ride request. That prediction depends on features like each driver’s acceptance rate, average trip distance, and how recently they completed a ride. Those features come from different pipelines and refresh on different schedules, but the model needs to see them as a single, consistent record at inference time.

A feature store manages this with four objects. **Feature Groups** collect related features that share a data source and computation pipeline. Each **Feature** is a single named value a pipeline produces, like an acceptance rate or a trip count. **Entities** tie those values to a real-world instance: one Aerospike record per driver, with every feature from every group co-located in the same record. **Datasets** define reproducible training slices by selecting which entities and features to include in the ML training step.

You’ll soon explore a minimal pre-made feature store in the provided `feature_store_tutorial.ipynb` notebook to understand how these objects map to Aerospike sets and records.

First, you’ll need to set up your system.

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-   I understand what a feature store is and why it’s needed.
-   I know the four main objects in a feature store.
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[Next  
Set up Aerospike](https://aerospike.com/docs/develop/feature-store/step/0/part/1/setup)