Using sklearn DictVectorizer in real-time systems
It depends on the learning algorithm that you are using. If you are using a method that has been designated for sparse data sets (FTRL, FFM, linear SVM) one possible approach is the following (note that it will introduce collisions in the features and a lot of constant columns).
First allocate for each element of your sample a (as large as possible) vector V, of length D.
For each categorical variable, evaluate hash(var_name + "_" + var_value) % D. This gives you an integer i, and you can store V[i] = 1.
Therefore, V never grows larger as new features appear. However, as soon as the number of features is large enough, some features will collide (i.e. be written at the same place) and this may result in an increased error rate...
Edit. You can write your own vectorizer to avoid collisions. First call L the current number of features. Prepare the same vector V of length 2L (this 2 will allow you to avoid collisions as new features arrive - at least for some time, depending of the arrival rate of new features).
Starting with an emty dictionary<input_type,int>, associate to each feature an integer. If have already seen the feature, return the int corresponding to the feature. If not, create a new entry with an integer corresponding to the new index. I think (but I am not sure) this is what LabelEncoder does for you.
Any binary one-hot encoding is aware of only values seen in training, so features not encountered during fitting will be silently ignored. For real time, where you have millions of records in a second, and features have very high cardinality, you need to keep your hasher/mapper updated with the data.
How can we do an incremental update to the hasher (rather calculating the entire fit() every time we incounter a new feature-value pair)? What is the suggested approach here the tackle this?