PySpark - Pass list as parameter to UDF

Question

I need to pass a list into a UDF, the list will determine the score/category of the distance. For now, I am hard coding all distances to be the 4th score.

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Answer 1

Hope this helps!

from pyspark.sql.functions import udf, col

#sample data
a= sqlContext.createDataFrame([("A", 20), ("B", 30), ("D", 80)],["Letter", "distances"])
label_list = ["Great", "Good", "OK", "Please Move", "Dead"]

def cate(label, feature_list):
    if feature_list == 0:
        return label[4]
    else:  #you may need to add 'else' condition as well otherwise 'null' will be added in this case
        return 'I am not sure!'

def udf_score(label_list):
    return udf(lambda l: cate(l, label_list))
a.withColumn("category", udf_score(label_list)(col("distances"))).show()

Output is:

+------+---------+--------------+
|Letter|distances|      category|
+------+---------+--------------+
|     A|       20|I am not sure!|
|     B|       30|I am not sure!|
|     D|       80|I am not sure!|
+------+---------+--------------+

Answer 2

I think this may help by passing list as a default value of a variable

from pyspark.sql.functions import udf, col

#sample data
a= sqlContext.createDataFrame([("A", 20), ("B", 30), ("D", 80),("E",0)],["Letter", "distances"])
label_list = ["Great", "Good", "OK", "Please Move", "Dead"]

#Passing List as Default value to a variable
def cate( feature_list,label=label_list):
    if feature_list == 0:
        return label[4]
    else:  #you may need to add 'else' condition as well otherwise 'null' will be added in this case
        return 'I am not sure!'

udfcate = udf(cate, StringType())

a.withColumn("category", udfcate("distances")).show()

Output:

+------+---------+--------------+
|Letter|distances|      category|
+------+---------+--------------+
|     A|       20|I am not sure!|
|     B|       30|I am not sure!|
|     D|       80|I am not sure!|
|     E|        0|          Dead|
+------+---------+--------------+

Answer 3

Try currying the function, so that the only argument in the DataFrame call is the name of the column on which you want the function to act:

udf_score=udf(lambda x: cate(label_list,x), StringType())
a.withColumn("category", udf_score("distances")).show(10)