dictionary - Group by and aggregate the values of a list of dictionaries in Python

Question

I'm trying to write a function, in an elegant way, that will group a list of dictionaries and aggregate (sum) the values of like-keys.

Example:

my_dataset = [  
    {
        'date': datetime.date(2013, 1, 1),
        'id': 99,
        'value1': 10,
        'value2': 10
    },
    {
        'date': datetime.date(2013, 1, 1),
        'id': 98,
        'value1': 10,
        'value2': 10
    },
    {
        'date': datetime.date(2013, 1, 2),
        'id' 99,
        'value1': 10,
        'value2': 10
    }
]

group_and_sum_dataset(my_dataset, 'date', ['value1', 'value2'])

"""
Should return:
[
    {
        'date': datetime.date(2013, 1, 1),
        'value1': 20,
        'value2': 20
    },
    {
        'date': datetime.date(2013, 1, 2),
        'value1': 10,
        'value2': 10
    }
]
"""

I've tried doing this using itertools for the groupby and summing each like-key value pair, but am missing something here. Here's what my function currently looks like:

def group_and_sum_dataset(dataset, group_by_key, sum_value_keys):
    keyfunc = operator.itemgetter(group_by_key)
    dataset.sort(key=keyfunc)
    new_dataset = []
    for key, index in itertools.groupby(dataset, keyfunc):
        d = {group_by_key: key}
        d.update({k:sum([item[k] for item in index]) for k in sum_value_keys})
        new_dataset.append(d)
    return new_dataset

Answer 1

You can use collections.Counter and collections.defaultdict.

Using a dict this can be done in O(N), while sorting requires O(NlogN) time.

from collections import defaultdict, Counter
def solve(dataset, group_by_key, sum_value_keys):
    dic = defaultdict(Counter)
    for item in dataset:
        key = item[group_by_key]
        vals = {k:item[k] for k in sum_value_keys}
        dic[key].update(vals)
    return dic
... 
>>> d = solve(my_dataset, 'date', ['value1', 'value2'])
>>> d
defaultdict(<class 'collections.Counter'>,
{
 datetime.date(2013, 1, 2): Counter({'value2': 10, 'value1': 10}),
 datetime.date(2013, 1, 1): Counter({'value2': 20, 'value1': 20})
})

The advantage of Counter is that it'll automatically sum the values of similar keys.:

Example:

>>> c = Counter(**{'value1': 10, 'value2': 5})
>>> c.update({'value1': 7, 'value2': 3})
>>> c
Counter({'value1': 17, 'value2': 8})