pyspark: rolling average using timeseries data

Question

I have a dataset consisting of a timestamp column and a dollars column. I would like to find the average number of dollars per week ending at the timestamp of each row. I

Answer 1

I figured out the correct way to calculate a moving/rolling average using this stackoverflow:

Spark Window Functions - rangeBetween dates

The basic idea is to convert your timestamp column to seconds, and then you can use the rangeBetween function in the pyspark.sql.Window class to include the correct rows in your window.

Here's the solved example:

%pyspark
from pyspark.sql import functions as F
from pyspark.sql.window import Window


#function to calculate number of seconds from number of days
days = lambda i: i * 86400

df = spark.createDataFrame([(17, "2017-03-10T15:27:18+00:00"),
                        (13, "2017-03-15T12:27:18+00:00"),
                        (25, "2017-03-18T11:27:18+00:00")],
                        ["dollars", "timestampGMT"])
df = df.withColumn('timestampGMT', df.timestampGMT.cast('timestamp'))

#create window by casting timestamp to long (number of seconds)
w = (Window.orderBy(F.col("timestampGMT").cast('long')).rangeBetween(-days(7), 0))

df = df.withColumn('rolling_average', F.avg("dollars").over(w))

This results in the exact column of rolling averages that I was looking for:

dollars   timestampGMT            rolling_average
17        2017-03-10 15:27:18.0   17.0
13        2017-03-15 12:27:18.0   15.0
25        2017-03-18 11:27:18.0   19.0