apache spark - Fill in null with previously known good value with pyspark

Question

Is there a way to replace null values in pyspark dataframe with the last valid value? There is addtional timestamp and session columns if you think you need them for windows partitioning and ordering. More specifically, I'd like to achieve the following conversion:

+---------+-----------+-----------+      +---------+-----------+-----------+
| session | timestamp |         id|      | session | timestamp |         id|
+---------+-----------+-----------+      +---------+-----------+-----------+
|        1|          1|       null|      |        1|          1|       null|
|        1|          2|        109|      |        1|          2|        109|
|        1|          3|       null|      |        1|          3|        109|
|        1|          4|       null|      |        1|          4|        109|
|        1|          5|        109| =>   |        1|          5|        109|
|        1|          6|       null|      |        1|          6|        109|
|        1|          7|        110|      |        1|          7|        110|
|        1|          8|       null|      |        1|          8|        110|
|        1|          9|       null|      |        1|          9|        110|
|        1|         10|       null|      |        1|         10|        110|
+---------+-----------+-----------+      +---------+-----------+-----------+

Answer 1

I believe I have a much simpler solution than the accepted. It is using Functions too, but uses the function called 'LAST' and ignores nulls.

Let's re-create something similar to the original data:

import sys
from pyspark.sql.window import Window
import pyspark.sql.functions as func

d = [{'session': 1, 'ts': 1}, {'session': 1, 'ts': 2, 'id': 109}, {'session': 1, 'ts': 3}, {'session': 1, 'ts': 4, 'id': 110}, {'session': 1, 'ts': 5},  {'session': 1, 'ts': 6}]
df = spark.createDataFrame(d)

This prints:

+-------+---+----+
|session| ts|  id|
+-------+---+----+
|      1|  1|null|
|      1|  2| 109|
|      1|  3|null|
|      1|  4| 110|
|      1|  5|null|
|      1|  6|null|
+-------+---+----+

Now, if we use the window function LAST:

df.withColumn("id", func.last('id', True).over(Window.partitionBy('session').orderBy('ts').rowsBetween(-sys.maxsize, 0))).show()

We just get:

+-------+---+----+
|session| ts|  id|
+-------+---+----+
|      1|  1|null|
|      1|  2| 109|
|      1|  3| 109|
|      1|  4| 110|
|      1|  5| 110|
|      1|  6| 110|
+-------+---+----+

Hope it helps!