How to do Stratified sampling with Spark DataFrame

Question

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• Stratified sampling in Spark 2 answers

I'm in Spark 1.3.0 and my data is in DataFrames. I need operations like sampleByKey(), sampleByKeyExact(). I saw the JIRA "Add approximate stratified sampling to DataFrame" (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-7157). That's targeted for Spark 1.5, till that comes through, whats the easiest way to accomplish the equivalent of sampleByKey() and sampleByKeyExact() on DataFrames. Thanks & Regards MK

Answer 1

Spark 1.1 added stratified sampling routines SampleByKey and SampleByKeyExact to Spark Core, so since then they are available without MLLib dependencies.

These two functions are PairRDDFunctions and belong to key-value RDD[(K,T)]. Also DataFrames do not have keys. You'd have to use underlying RDD - something like below:

val df = ... // your dataframe
val fractions: Map[K, Double] = ... // specify the exact fraction desired from each key

val sample = df.rdd.keyBy(x=>x(0)).sampleByKey(false, fractions)

Note that sample is RDD not DataFrame now, but you can easily convert it back to DataFrame since you already have schema defined for df.