Find maximum row per group in Spark DataFrame

Question

I\'m trying to use Spark dataframes instead of RDDs since they appear to be more high-level than RDDs and tend to produce more readable code.

In a 14-nodes Google Da

Answer 1

Using join (it will result in more than one row in group in case of ties):

import pyspark.sql.functions as F
from pyspark.sql.functions import count, col 

cnts = df.groupBy("id_sa", "id_sb").agg(count("*").alias("cnt")).alias("cnts")
maxs = cnts.groupBy("id_sa").agg(F.max("cnt").alias("mx")).alias("maxs")

cnts.join(maxs, 
  (col("cnt") == col("mx")) & (col("cnts.id_sa") == col("maxs.id_sa"))
).select(col("cnts.id_sa"), col("cnts.id_sb"))

Using window functions (will drop ties):

from pyspark.sql.functions import row_number
from pyspark.sql.window import Window

w = Window().partitionBy("id_sa").orderBy(col("cnt").desc())

(cnts
  .withColumn("rn", row_number().over(w))
  .where(col("rn") == 1)
  .select("id_sa", "id_sb"))

Using struct ordering:

from pyspark.sql.functions import struct

(cnts
  .groupBy("id_sa")
  .agg(F.max(struct(col("cnt"), col("id_sb"))).alias("max"))
  .select(col("id_sa"), col("max.id_sb")))

See also How to select the first row of each group?