Renaming columns for PySpark DataFrame aggregates

Question

I am analysing some data with PySpark DataFrames. Suppose I have a DataFrame df that I am aggregating:

(df.groupBy("group")
   .agg({"money":"sum"})
   .show(100))

This will give me:

group                SUM(money#2L)
A                    137461285853
B                    172185566943
C                    271179590646

The aggregation works just fine but I dislike the new column name "SUM(money#2L)". Is there a way to rename this column into something human readable from the .agg method? Maybe something more similar to what one would do in dplyr:

df %>% group_by(group) %>% summarise(sum_money = sum(money))

Answer 1

Although I still prefer dplyr syntax, this code snippet will do:

import pyspark.sql.functions as sf

(df.groupBy("group")
   .agg(sf.sum('money').alias('money'))
   .show(100))

It gets verbose.

Answer 2

withColumnRenamed should do the trick. Here is the link to the pyspark.sql API.

df.groupBy("group")\
  .agg({"money":"sum"})\
  .withColumnRenamed("SUM(money)", "money")
  .show(100)

Answer 3

It's simple as:

 val maxVideoLenPerItemDf = requiredItemsFiltered.groupBy("itemId").agg(max("playBackDuration").as("customVideoLength"))
maxVideoLenPerItemDf.show()

Use .as in agg to name the new row created.

Answer 4

I made a little helper function for this that might help some people out.

import re

from functools import partial

def rename_cols(agg_df, ignore_first_n=1):
    """changes the default spark aggregate names `avg(colname)` 
    to something a bit more useful. Pass an aggregated dataframe
    and the number of aggregation columns to ignore.
    """
    delimiters = "(", ")"
    split_pattern = '|'.join(map(re.escape, delimiters))
    splitter = partial(re.split, split_pattern)
    split_agg = lambda x: '_'.join(splitter(x))[0:-ignore_first_n]
    renamed = map(split_agg, agg_df.columns[ignore_first_n:])
    renamed = zip(agg_df.columns[ignore_first_n:], renamed)
    for old, new in renamed:
        agg_df = agg_df.withColumnRenamed(old, new)
    return agg_df

An example:

gb = (df.selectExpr("id", "rank", "rate", "price", "clicks")
 .groupby("id")
 .agg({"rank": "mean",
       "*": "count",
       "rate": "mean", 
       "price": "mean", 
       "clicks": "mean", 
       })
)

>>> gb.columns
['id',
 'avg(rate)',
 'count(1)',
 'avg(price)',
 'avg(rank)',
 'avg(clicks)']

>>> rename_cols(gb).columns
['id',
 'avg_rate',
 'count_1',
 'avg_price',
 'avg_rank',
 'avg_clicks']

Doing at least a bit to save people from typing so much.

Answer 5

df = df.groupby('Device_ID').agg(aggregate_methods)
for column in df.columns:
    start_index = column.find('(')
    end_index = column.find(')')
    if (start_index and end_index):
        df = df.withColumnRenamed(column, column[start_index+1:end_index])

The above code can strip out anything that is outside of the "()". For example, "sum(foo)" will be renamed as "foo".

Answer 6

import findspark
findspark.init()

from pyspark.sql import SparkSession
from pyspark.sql.functions import *
from pyspark.sql.types import *

spark = SparkSession.builder.appName('test').getOrCreate()
data = [(1, "siva", 100), (2, "siva2", 200),(3, "siva3", 300),(4, "siva4", 400),(5, "siva5", 500)]
schema = ['id', 'name', 'sallary']

df = spark.createDataFrame(data, schema=schema)
df.show()
+---+-----+-------+
| id| name|sallary|
+---+-----+-------+
|  1| siva|    100|
|  2|siva2|    200|
|  3|siva3|    300|
|  4|siva4|    400|
|  5|siva5|    500|
+---+-----+-------+


**df.agg({"sallary": "max"}).withColumnRenamed('max(sallary)', 'max').show()**
+---+
|max|
+---+
|500|
+---+

Answer 7

While the previously given answers are good, I think they're lacking a neat way to deal with dictionary-usage in the .agg()

If you want to use a dict, which actually might be also dynamically generated because you have hundreds of columns, you can use the following without dealing with dozens of code-lines:

# Your dictionary-version of using the .agg()-function
# Note: The provided logic could actually also be applied to a non-dictionary approach
df = df.groupBy("group")\
   .agg({
          "money":"sum"
        , "...":  "..."
    })

# Now do the renaming
newColumnNames = ["group", "money", "..."] # Provide the names for ALL columns of the new df
df = df.toDF(*newColumnNames)              # Do the renaming

Of course the newColumnNames-list can also be dynamically generated. E.g., if you only append columns from the aggregation to your df you can pre-store newColumnNames = df.columns and then just append the additional names.
Anyhow, be aware that the newColumnNames must contain all column names of the dataframe, not only those to be renamed (because .toDF() creates a new dataframe due to Sparks immutable RDDs)!