How to compute percentiles in Apache Spark

Question

I have an rdd of integers (i.e. RDD[Int]) and what I would like to do is to compute the following ten percentiles: [0th, 10th, 20th, ..., 90th, 100th]

Answer 1

I discovered this gist

https://gist.github.com/felixcheung/92ae74bc349ea83a9e29

that contains the following function:

  /**
   * compute percentile from an unsorted Spark RDD
   * @param data: input data set of Long integers
   * @param tile: percentile to compute (eg. 85 percentile)
   * @return value of input data at the specified percentile
   */
  def computePercentile(data: RDD[Long], tile: Double): Double = {
    // NIST method; data to be sorted in ascending order
    val r = data.sortBy(x => x)
    val c = r.count()
    if (c == 1) r.first()
    else {
      val n = (tile / 100d) * (c + 1d)
      val k = math.floor(n).toLong
      val d = n - k
      if (k <= 0) r.first()
      else {
        val index = r.zipWithIndex().map(_.swap)
        val last = c
        if (k >= c) {
          index.lookup(last - 1).head
        } else {
          index.lookup(k - 1).head + d * (index.lookup(k).head - index.lookup(k - 1).head)
        }
      }
    }
  }