So far, the few programming examples in the SoS (Scala on Spark) blog series have all centered around DataFrames. In this blog post, I would like to give an example on Spark’s RDD (resilient distributed data), which is an immutable distributed collection of data that can be processed via functional transformations (e.g. map, filter, reduce).

The main difference between the RDD and DataFrame APIs is that the former provides more granular low-level functionality whereas the latter is equipped with powerful SQL-style functions to process table-form data. Note that even though a DataFrame is in table form with named columns, the underlying JVM only treats each row of the data a generic untyped object. As a side note, Spark also supports another data abstraction called Dataset, which is a distributed collection of strongly-typed objects.

Back to the RDD world. In this programming exercise, our goal is to count the number of occurrences of every distinct pair of consecutive words in a text file. In essence, for every given distinct word in a text file we’re going to count the number of occurrences of all distinct words following the word. As a trivial example, if the text is “I am what I am”, the result should be (i, am) = 2, (what, i) = 1, (am, what) = 1.

For illustration purpose, let’s assemble a small piece of text as follows and save it in a file, say in a Hadoop HDFS file system:

Simple word count

As a warm-up exercise, let’s perform a hello-world word count, which simply reports the count of every distinct word in a text file. Using the ‘textFile()’ method in SparkContext, which serves as the entry point for every program to be able to access resources on a Spark cluster, we load the content from the HDFS file:

Viewed as a collection of lines (delimited by carriage returns), we first use ‘flatMap’ to split each line of the text by punctuations into an array of words then flatten the arrays. Note that ‘_.split()’ is just a Scala short-hand for ‘line => line.split()’.

Next, all words are lowercased (to disregard cases) with the transformation ‘word => word.toLowerCase’, followed by a map transformation ‘word => (word, 1)’ for tallying. Using ‘reduceByKey’, the reduction transformation ‘(total, count) => total + count’ (short-handed as ‘(_ + _)’) for each key transforms every word into a tuple of (word, totalcount). The final sorting is just for ordering the result by count.

Since the dataset is small, we can ‘collect’ the result data to see the output:

On a related note, Spark’s ‘reduceByKey()’ along with a couple of other ‘xxxxByKey()’ functions are handy tools for this kind of key-value pair transformations. Had they not been provided, one would have to do it with a little more hand-crafting work like:

Word-pair count

Now, let’s move onto the main topic of this blog post – counting distinct pairs of consecutive words:

Even though the required logic for counting word pairs is apparently more complex than that of counting individual words, the necessary transformations look only slightly different. It’s partly due to how compositions of modularized functions can make complex data transformations look seemingly simple in a functional programming language like Scala. Another key factor in this case is the availability of the powerful ‘sliding(n)’ function, which transforms a collection of elements into sliding windows each in the form of an array of size ‘n’. For example, applying sliding(2) to a sequence of words “apples”, “and”, “oranges” would result in Array(“apples”, “and”) and Array(“and”, “oranges”).

Scanning through the compositional functions, the split by punctuations and lowercasing do exactly the same thing as in the hello-world word count case. Next, ‘sliding(2)’ generates sliding window of word pairs each stored in an array. The subsequent ‘map’ each of the word-pair arrays into a key/value tuple with the word-pair-tuple being the key and 1 being the count value.

Similar to the reduction transformation in the hello-world word count case, ‘reduceByKey()’ generates count for each word pair. Result is then sorted by count, 1st word in word-pair, 2nd word in word-pair. Output of the word-pair count using ‘collect’ is as follows:

Creating a word-pair count method

The above word-pair counting snippet can be repurposed to serve as a general method for counting a specific word-pair in a text file:

It’s worth noting that Scala’s collect method (not to be confused with Spark’s RDD ‘collect’ method) has now replaced method ‘map’ in the previous snippet. It’s because we’re now interested in counting only the specific word-pair word1 and word2, thus requiring the inherent filtering functionality from method ‘collect’. Also note that in the ‘case’ statement the pair of words are enclosed in backticks to refer to the passed-in words, rather than arbitrary pattern-matching variables.

To use the word-pair count method, simply provide the pair of consecutive words and the file path as parameters, along with the SparkContext to be passed in an implicit parameter. For example: