Split large dataframes (pandas) into chunks (but after grouping) - python

I have a large tabular data, which needs to be merged and splitted by group. The easy method is to use pandas, but the only problem is memory.
I have this code to merge dataframes:
import pandas as pd;
from functools import reduce;
large_df = pd.read_table('large_file.csv', sep=',')
This, basically load the whole data in memory th
# Then I could group the pandas dataframe by some column value (say "block" )
df_by_block = large_df.groupby("block")
# and then write the data by blocks as
for block_id, block_val in df_by_block:
pd.Dataframe.to_csv(df_by_block, "df_" + str(block_id), sep="\t", index=False)
The only problem with above code is memory allocation, which freezes my desktop. I tried to transfer this code to dask but dask doesn't have a neat groupby implementation.
Note: I could have just sorted the file, then read the data line by line and split as the "block" value changes. But, the only problem is that "large_df.txt" is created in the pipeline upstream by merging several dataframes.
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Update:
I tried the following approach but, it still seems to be memory heavy:
# find unique values in the column of interest (which is to be "grouped by")
large_df_contig = large_df['contig']
contig_list = list(large_df_contig.unique().compute())
# groupby the dataframe
large_df_grouped = large_df.set_index('contig')
# now, split dataframes
for items in contig_list:
my_df = large_df_grouped.loc[items].compute().reset_index()
pd.DataFrame.to_csv(my_df, 'dask_output/my_df_' + str(items), sep='\t', index=False)
Everything is fine, but the code
my_df = large_df_grouped.loc[items].compute().reset_index()
seems to be pulling everything into the memory again.
Any way to improve this code??

but dask doesn't have a neat groupb
Actually, dask does have groupby + user defined functions with OOM reshuffling.
You can use
large_df.groupby(something).apply(write_to_disk)
where write_to_disk is some short function writing the block to the disk. By default, dask uses disk shuffling in these cases (as opposed to network shuffling). Note that this operation might be slow, and it can still fail if the size of a single group exceeds your memory.

Related

How do I create a Dask DataFrame partition by partition and write portions to disk while the DataFrame is still incomplete?

I have python code for data analysis that iterates through hundreds of datasets, does some computation and produces a result as a pandas DataFrame, and then concatenates all the results together. I am currently working with a set of data where these results are too large to fit into memory, so I'm trying to switch from pandas to Dask.
The problem is that I have looked through the Dask documentation and done some Googling and I can't really figure out how to create a Dask DataFrame iteratively like how I described above in a way that will take advantage of Dask's ability to only keep portions of the DataFrame in memory. Everything I see assumes that you either have all the data already stored in some format on disk, or that you have all the data in memory and now want to save it to disk.
What's the best way to approach this? My current code using pandas looks something like this:
def process_data(data) -> pd.DataFrame:
# Do stuff
return df
dfs = []
for data in datasets:
result = process_data(data)
dfs.append(result)
final_result = pd.concat(dfs)
final_result.to_csv("result.csv")
Expanding from #MichelDelgado comment, the correct approach should somethign like this:
import dask.dataframe as dd
from dask.delayed import delayed
def process_data(data) -> pd.DataFrame:
# Do stuff
return df
delayed_dfs = []
for data in datasets:
result = delayed(process_data)(data)
delayed_dfs.append(result)
ddf = dd.from_delayed(delayed_dfs)
ddf.to_csv('export-*.csv')
Note that this would created multiple CSV files, one per input partition.
You can find documentation here: https://docs.dask.org/en/stable/delayed-collections.html.
Also, be careful to actually read the data into the process function. So the data argument in the code above should only be an identifier, like a file path or equivalent.

Pandas / Dask - group by & aggregating a large CSV blows the memory and/or takes quite a while

I'm trying a small POC to try to group by & aggregate to reduce data from a large CSV in pandas and Dask, and I'm observing high memory usage and/or slower than I would expect processing times... does anyone have any tips for a python/pandas/dask noob to improve this?
Background
I have a request to build a file ingestion tool that would:
Be able to take in files of a few GBs where each row contains user id and some other info
do some transformations
reduce the data to { user -> [collection of info]}
send batches of this data to our web services
Based on my research, since files are only few GBs, I found that Spark, etc would be overkill, and Pandas/Dask may be a good fit, hence the POC.
Problem
Processing a 1GB csv takes ~1 min for both pandas and Dask, and consumes 1.5GB ram for pandas and 9GB ram for dask (!!!)
Processing a 2GB csv takes ~3 mins and 2.8GB ram for pandas, Dask crashes!
What am I doing wrong here?
for pandas, since I'm processing the CSV in small chunks, I did not expect the RAM usage to be so high
for Dask, everything I read online suggested that Dask processes the CSV in blocks indicated by blocksize, and as such the ram usage should expect to be blocksize * size per block, but I wouldn't expect total to be 9GB when the block size is only 6.4MB. I don't know why on earth its ram usage skyrockets to 9GB for a 1GB csv input
(Note: if I don't set the block size dask crashes even on input 1GB)
My code
I can't share the CSV, but it has 1 integer column followed by 8 text columns. Both user_id and order_id columns referenced below are text columns.
1GB csv has 14000001 lines
2GB csv has 28000001 lines
5GB csv has 70000001 lines
I generated these csvs with random data, and the user_id column I randomly picked from 10 pre-randomly-generated values, so I'd expect the final output to be 10 user ids each with a collection of who knows how many order ids.
Pandas
#!/usr/bin/env python3
from pandas import DataFrame, read_csv
import pandas as pd
import sys
test_csv_location = '1gb.csv'
chunk_size = 100000
pieces = list()
for chunk in pd.read_csv(test_csv_location, chunksize=chunk_size, delimiter='|', iterator=True):
df = chunk.groupby('user_id')['order_id'].agg(size= len,list= lambda x: list(x))
pieces.append(df)
final = pd.concat(pieces).groupby('user_id')['list'].agg(size= len,list=sum)
final.to_csv('pandastest.csv', index=False)
Dask
#!/usr/bin/env python3
from dask.distributed import Client
import dask.dataframe as ddf
import sys
test_csv_location = '1gb.csv'
df = ddf.read_csv(test_csv_location, blocksize=6400000, delimiter='|')
# For each user, reduce to a list of order ids
grouped = df.groupby('user_id')
collection = grouped['order_id'].apply(list, meta=('order_id', 'f8'))
collection.to_csv('./dasktest.csv', single_file=True)
The groupby operation is expensive because dask will try to shuffle data across workers to check who has which user_id values. If user_id has a lot of unique values (sounds like it), there is a lot of cross-checks to be done across workers/partitions.
There are at least two ways out of it:
set user_id as index. This will be expensive during the indexing stage, but subsequent operations will be faster because now dask doesn't have to check each partition for the values of user_id it has.
df = df.set_index('user_id')
collection = df.groupby('user_id')['order_id'].apply(list, meta=('order_id', 'f8'))
collection.to_csv('./dasktest.csv', single_file=True)
if your files have a structure that you know about, e.g. as an extreme example, if user_id are somewhat sorted, so that first the csv file contains only user_id values that start with 1 (or A, or whatever other symbols are used), then with 2, etc, then you could use that information to form partitions in 'blocks' (loose term) in a way that groupby would be needed only within those 'blocks'.

How to perform operations on a Dask dataframe and export the results to a csv?

I have a large input csv file (several GBs) that I import in Dask with a blocksize of 5e6. The input csv contains two columns: "ID" and "Text".
ddf1 = dd.read_csv('REL_Input.csv', names=['ID', 'Text'], blocksize=5e6)
I need to add a third column to ddf1, "Hash", by parsing the existing "Text" column for a string between "Hash=" and ";". In Pandas, I can simply do this:
ddf1['Hash'] = ddf1['Text'].str.extract(r'Hash=(.*?);')
When I do this in Dask, I get an error saying that the "column assignment doesn't support dask.dataframe.core.DataFrame". I tried to use assign but had no luck.
I also need to read multiple large csv files (each several GBs in size) from a directory, concatenate them into another Dask dataframe, ddf2. Each of these csv files have 100s of columns but I only need 2: "Hash" and "Name". Here is the code to create ddf2:
ddf2 = dd.concat([dd.read_csv(f, usecols=['Hash', 'Name'], blocksize=5e6) for f in glob.glob('*.tsv')], ignore_index=True, axis=0)
Then, I need to merge the two dataframes on the "Hash" columns--something like this:
ddf3 = ddf1[['ID', 'ddf1_Hash']].merge(ddf2[['ddf2_Hash', 'Name']], left_on='ddf1_Hash', right_on='ddf2_Hash', how='left')
Finally, I need to export ddf3 as a csv:
df3.to_csv('Output.csv')
I looked and it seems I can create the column for ddf1 and perform the merge operation by changing both ddf1 and ddf2 to pandas dfs using compute. However, that's not an option for me due to the sheer size of these dataframes. I also tried using the chunks approach in Pandas, but that does not work due to the "out of memory" error.
Is there a good way to tackle this problem? I'm still learning Python so any help would be appreciated.
UPDATE:
I am able to create the third column and merge the two dataframes. Though, now the issue is that I can't export the merged dataframe as a csv.
Running regex on a string column. The following snippet uses assign:
import dask.dataframe as dd
import pandas as pd
# this step is just to setup a minimum reproducible example
df = pd.DataFrame(list("abcdefghi"), columns=['A'])
ddf = dd.from_pandas(df, npartitions=3)
# this uses assign to extract the relevant content
ddf = ddf.assign(check_c = lambda x: x['A'].str.extract(r'([a-z])'))
# you can see that the computation was done correctly
ddf.compute()
Concatenating csv files. Do csv files have the same structure/columns? If so, you can just use dd.read_csv("path_to_csv_files/*csv"), but if the files have different structures, then your approach is correct:
ddf2 = dd.concat([dd.read_csv(f, usecols=['Hash', 'Name'], blocksize=5e6) for f in glob.glob('*.tsv')], ignore_index=True, axis=0)
Merging the dataframes. This is going to be an expensive operation, here's a couple of options to potentially reduce the cost of this:
if any of the dataframes can be put into memory, then it would help to run .compute() to get pandas dataframe before the merge;
setting the key variable as index on one or both dataframes:
ddf1 = ddf1.set_index('Hash')
ddf2 = ddf2.set_index('Hash')
ddf3 = ddf1.merge(ddf2, left_index=True, right_index=True)
Saving csv, by default, dask will save each partition to its own csv file, so your path needs to contain an asterisk, e.g.:
df3.to_csv('Output_*.csv', index=False)
There are other options possible (explicit paths, custom name function, see https://docs.dask.org/en/latest/dataframe-api.html#dask.dataframe.to_csv).
If you need a single file, you can use
df3.to_csv('Output.csv', index=False, single_file=True)
However, this option is not supported on all systems, so you might want to check that it works using a small sample first (see documentation).

Improve performance of rewriting timestamps in parquet files

Due to some limitations of the consumer of my data, I need to "rewrite" some parquet files to convert timestamps that are in nanosecond precision to timestamps that are in millisecond precision.
I have implemented this and it works but I am not completely satisfied with it.
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_parquet(
f's3://{bucket}/{key}', engine='pyarrow')
for col_name in df.columns:
if df[col_name].dtype == 'datetime64[ns]':
df[col_name] = df[col_name].values.astype('datetime64[ms]')
df.to_parquet(f's3://{outputBucket}/{outputPrefix}{additionalSuffix}',
engine='pyarrow', index=False)
I'm currently running this job in lambda for each file but I can see this may be expensive and may not always work if the job takes longer than 15 minutes as that is the maximum time Lambda's can run.
The files can be on the larger side (>500 MB).
Any ideas or other methods I could consider? I am unable to use pyspark as my dataset has unsigned integers in it.
You could try rewriting all columns at once. Maybe this would reduce some memory copies in pandas, thus speeding up the process if you have many columns:
df_datetimes = df.select_dtypes(include="datetime64[ns]")
df[df_datetimes.columns] = df_datetimes.astype("datetime64[ms]")
Add use_deprecated_int96_timestamps=True to df.to_parquet() when you first write the file, and it will save as a nanosecond timestamp. https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/generated/pyarrow.parquet.ParquetWriter.html

Pandas MemoryError when reading large CSV followed by `.iloc` slicing columns

I've been trying to process a 1.4GB CSV file with Pandas, but keep having memory problems. I have tried different things in attempt to make Pandas read_csv work to no avail.
It didn't work when I used the iterator=True and chunksize=number parameters. Moreover, the smaller the chunksize, the slower it is to process the same amount of data.
(Simple heavier overhead doesn't explain it because it was way too slower when number of chunks is big. I suspect when processing every chunk, panda needs to go though all the chunks before it to "get to it", instead of jumping right to the start of the chunk. This seems the only way this can be explained.)
Then as a last resort, I split the CSV files into 6 parts, and tried to read them one by one, but still get MemoryError.
(I have monitored the memory usage of python when running the code below, and found that each time python finishes processing a file and moves on to the next, the memory usage goes up. It seemed quite obvious that panda didn't release memory for the previous file when it's already finished processing it.)
The code may not make sense but that's because I removed the part where it writes into an SQL database to simplify it and isolate the problem.
import csv,pandas as pd
import glob
filenameStem = 'Crimes'
counter = 0
for filename in glob.glob(filenameStem + '_part*.csv'): # reading files Crimes_part1.csv through Crimes_part6.csv
chunk = pd.read_csv(filename)
df = chunk.iloc[:,[5,8,15,16]]
df = df.dropna(how='any')
counter += 1
print(counter)
you may try to parse only those columns that you need (as #BrenBarn said in comments):
import os
import glob
import pandas as pd
def get_merged_csv(flist, **kwargs):
return pd.concat([pd.read_csv(f, **kwargs) for f in flist], ignore_index=True)
fmask = 'Crimes_part*.csv'
cols = [5,8,15,16]
df = get_merged_csv(glob.glob(fmask), index_col=None, usecols=cols).dropna(how='any')
print(df.head())
PS this will include only 4 out of at least 17 columns in your resulting data frame
Thanks for the reply.
After some debugging, I have located the problem. The "iloc" subsetting of pandas created a circular reference, which prevented garbage recollection. Detailed discussion can be found here
I have found same issues in csv file. First to make csv as chunks and fix the chunksize.use the chunksize or iterator parameter to return the data in chunks.
Syntax:
csv_onechunk = padas.read_csv(filepath, sep = delimiter, skiprows = 1, chunksize = 10000)
then concatenate the chunks (Only valid with C parser)

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