Calculate the mode of a PySpark DataFrame column?

Question

Ultimately what I want is the mode of a column, for all the columns in the DataFrame. For other summary statistics, I see a couple of options: use DataFrame aggregation, or

Answer 1

A problem with mode is pretty much the same as with median. While it is easy to compute, computation is rather expensive. It can be done either using sort followed by local and global aggregations or using just-another-wordcount and filter:

import numpy as np
np.random.seed(1)

df = sc.parallelize([
    (int(x), ) for x in np.random.randint(50, size=10000)
]).toDF(["x"])

cnts = df.groupBy("x").count()
mode = cnts.join(
    cnts.agg(max("count").alias("max_")), col("count") == col("max_")
).limit(1).select("x")
mode.first()[0]
## 0

Either way it may require a full shuffle for each column.