Spark / Scala: forward fill with last observation

Initial answer (a single time series assumption):

First of all try avoid window functions if you cannot provide PARTITION BY clause. It moves data to a single partition so most of the time it is simply not feasible.

What you can do is to fill gaps on RDD using mapPartitionsWithIndex. Since you didn’t provide an example data or expected output consider this to be pseudocode not a real Scala program:

• first lets order DataFrame by date and convert to RDD

  import org.apache.spark.sql.Row
  import org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD
  
  val rows: RDD[Row] = df.orderBy($"Date").rdd
  

• next lets find the last not null observation per partition

  def notMissing(row: Row): Boolean = ???
  
  val toCarry: scala.collection.Map[Int,Option[org.apache.spark.sql.Row]] = rows
    .mapPartitionsWithIndex{ case (i, iter) => 
      Iterator((i, iter.filter(notMissing(_)).toSeq.lastOption)) }
    .collectAsMap
  

• and convert this Map to broadcast

  val toCarryBd = sc.broadcast(toCarry)
  

• finally map over partitions once again filling the gaps:

  def fill(i: Int, iter: Iterator[Row]): Iterator[Row] = {
    // If it is the beginning of partition and value is missing
    // extract value to fill from toCarryBd.value
    // Remember to correct for empty / only missing partitions
    // otherwise take last not-null from the current partition
  }
  
  val imputed: RDD[Row] = rows
    .mapPartitionsWithIndex{ case (i, iter) => fill(i, iter) } 
  

• finally convert back to DataFrame

Edit (partitioned / time series per group data):

The devil is in the detail. If your data is partitioned after all then a whole problem can be solved using groupBy. Lets assume you simply partition by column “v” of type T and Date is an integer timestamp:

def fill(iter: List[Row]): List[Row] = {
  // Just go row by row and fill with last non-empty value
  ???
}

val groupedAndSorted = df.rdd
  .groupBy(_.getAs[T]("k"))
  .mapValues(_.toList.sortBy(_.getAs[Int]("Date")))

val rows: RDD[Row] = groupedAndSorted.mapValues(fill).values.flatMap(identity)

val dfFilled = sqlContext.createDataFrame(rows, df.schema)

This way you can fill all columns at the same time.

Can this be done with DataFrames instead of converting back and forth to RDD?

It depends, although it is unlikely to be efficient. If maximum gap is relatively small you can do something like this:

import org.apache.spark.sql.functions._
import org.apache.spark.sql.expressions.{WindowSpec, Window}
import org.apache.spark.sql.Column

val maxGap: Int = ???  // Maximum gap between observations
val columnsToFill: List[String] = ???  // List of columns to fill
val suffix: String = "_" // To disambiguate between original and imputed 

// Take lag 1 to maxGap and coalesce
def makeCoalesce(w: WindowSpec)(magGap: Int)(suffix: String)(c: String) = {
  // Generate lag values between 1 and maxGap
  val lags = (1 to maxGap).map(lag(col(c), _)over(w))
  // Add current, coalesce and set alias
  coalesce(col(c) +: lags: _*).alias(s"$c$suffix")
}


// For each column you want to fill nulls apply makeCoalesce
val lags: List[Column] = columnsToFill.map(makeCoalesce(w)(maxGap)("_"))


// Finally select
val dfImputed = df.select($"*" :: lags: _*)

It can be easily adjusted to use different maximum gap per column.

A simpler way to achieve a similar result in the latest Spark version is to use last with ignoreNulls:

import org.apache.spark.sql.functions._
import org.apache.spark.sql.expressions.Window

val w = Window.partitionBy($"k").orderBy($"Date")
  .rowsBetween(Window.unboundedPreceding, -1)

df.withColumn("value", coalesce($"value", last($"value", true).over(w)))

While it is possible to drop partitionBy clause and apply this method globally, it would prohibitively expensive with large datasets.