Return RDD of largest N values from another RDD in SPARK

Question

I\'m trying to filter an RDD of tuples to return the largest N tuples based on key values. I need the return format to be an RDD.

So the RDD:

[(4, \'         


        

Answer 1

With RDD

A quick but not particularly efficient solution is to follow sortByKey use zipWithIndex and filter:

n = 3
rdd = sc.parallelize([(4, 'a'), (12, 'e'), (2, 'u'), (49, 'y'), (6, 'p')])

rdd.sortByKey().zipWithIndex().filter(lambda xi: xi[1] < n).keys()

If n is relatively small compared to RDD size a little bit more efficient approach is to avoid full sort:

import heapq

def key(kv):
    return kv[0]

top_per_partition = rdd.mapPartitions(lambda iter: heapq.nlargest(n, iter, key))
top_per_partition.sortByKey().zipWithIndex().filter(lambda xi: xi[1] < n).keys()

If keys are much smaller than values and order of final output doesn't matter then filter approach can work just fine:

keys = rdd.keys()
identity = lambda x: x

offset = (keys
    .mapPartitions(lambda iter: heapq.nlargest(n, iter))
    .sortBy(identity)
    .zipWithIndex()
    .filter(lambda xi: xi[1] < n)
    .keys()
    .max())

rdd.filter(lambda kv: kv[0] <= offset)

Also it won't keep exact n values in case of ties.

With DataFrames

You can just orderBy and limit:

from pyspark.sql.functions import col

rdd.toDF().orderBy(col("_1").desc()).limit(n)

Answer 2

A less effort approach since you only want to convert take(N) results to new RDD.

sc.parallelize(yourSortedRdd.take(Nth))