How does R support streaming feature pipelines in real-time ML systems?

R supports streaming feature pipelines through integration with Kafka, Spark Streaming, and micro-batch processing.

R is not inherently streaming-native, so real-time pipelines are built using external systems. Kafka streams events, Spark processes them in micro-batches, and R is used for feature scoring or downstream analytics. The architecture separates ingestion (Kafka), processing (Spark), and analytics (R).