How to detect null column in pyspark - apache-spark

Question

I have a dataframe defined with some null values. Some Columns are fully null values.
>> df.show()
+---+---+---+----+
| A| B| C| D|
+---+---+---+----+
|1.0|4.0|7.0|null|
|2.0|5.0|7.0|null|
|3.0|6.0|5.0|null|
+---+---+---+----+
In my case, I want to return a list of columns name that are filled with null values. My idea was to detect the constant columns (as the whole column contains the same null value).
this is how I did it:
nullCoulumns = [c for c, const in df.select([(min(c) == max(c)).alias(c) for c in df.columns]).first().asDict().items() if const]
but this does no consider null columns as constant, it works only with values.
How should I then do it ?

Answer 1

Extend the condition to
from pyspark.sql.functions import min, max
((min(c).isNull() & max(c).isNull()) | (min(c) == max(c))).alias(c)
or use eqNullSafe (PySpark 2.3):
(min(c).eqNullSafe(max(c))).alias(c)

Answer 2

One way would be to do it implicitly: select each column, count its NULL values, and then compare this with the total number or rows. With your data, this would be:
spark.version
# u'2.2.0'
from pyspark.sql.functions import col
nullColumns = []
numRows = df.count()
for k in df.columns:
nullRows = df.where(col(k).isNull()).count()
if nullRows == numRows: # i.e. if ALL values are NULL
nullColumns.append(k)
nullColumns
# ['D']
But there is a simpler way: it turns out that the function countDistinct, when applied to a column with all NULL values, returns zero (0):
from pyspark.sql.functions import countDistinct
df.agg(countDistinct(df.D).alias('distinct')).collect()
# [Row(distinct=0)]
So the for loop now can be:
nullColumns = []
for k in df.columns:
if df.agg(countDistinct(df[k])).collect()[0][0] == 0:
nullColumns.append(k)
nullColumns
# ['D']
UPDATE (after comments): It seems possible to avoid collect in the second solution; since df.agg returns a dataframe with only one row, replacing collect with take(1) will safely do the job:
nullColumns = []
for k in df.columns:
if df.agg(countDistinct(df[k])).take(1)[0][0] == 0:
nullColumns.append(k)
nullColumns
# ['D']

Answer 3

How about this? In order to guarantee the column are all nulls, two properties must be satisfied:
(1) The min value is equal to the max value
(2) The min or max is null
Or, equivalently
(1) The min AND max are both equal to None
Note that if property (2) is not satisfied, the case where column values are [null, 1, null, 1] would be incorrectly reported since the min and max will be 1.
import pyspark.sql.functions as F
def get_null_column_names(df):
column_names = []
for col_name in df.columns:
min_ = df.select(F.min(col_name)).first()[0]
max_ = df.select(F.max(col_name)).first()[0]
if min_ is None and max_ is None:
column_names.append(col_name)
return column_names
Here's an example in practice:
>>> rows = [(None, 18, None, None),
(1, None, None, None),
(1, 9, 4.0, None),
(None, 0, 0., None)]
>>> schema = "a: int, b: int, c: float, d:int"
>>> df = spark.createDataFrame(data=rows, schema=schema)
>>> df.show()
+----+----+----+----+
| a| b| c| d|
+----+----+----+----+
|null| 18|null|null|
| 1|null|null|null|
| 1| 9| 4.0|null|
|null| 0| 0.0|null|
+----+----+----+----+
>>> get_null_column_names(df)
['d']