I would like to apply a function to a dask.DataFrame, that returns a Series of variable length. An example to illustrate this:
def generate_varibale_length_series(x):
'''returns pd.Series with variable length'''
n_columns = np.random.randint(100)
return pd.Series(np.random.randn(n_columns))
#apply this function to a dask.DataFrame
pdf = pd.DataFrame(dict(A=[1,2,3,4,5,6]))
ddf = dd.from_pandas(pdf, npartitions = 3)
result = ddf.apply(generate_varibale_length_series, axis = 1).compute()
Apparently, this works fine.
Concerning this, I have two questions:
- Is this supposed to work always or am I just lucky here? Is dask expecting, that all partitions have the same amount of columns?
- In case the metadata inference fails, how can I provide metadata, if the number of columns is not known beforehand?
Background / usecase: In my dataframe each row represents a simulation trail. The function I want to apply extracts time points of certain events from it. Since I do not know the number of events per trail in advance, I do not know how many columns the resulting dataframe will have.
Edit:
As MRocklin suggested, here an approach that uses dask delayed to compute result:
#convert ddf to delayed objects
ddf_delayed = ddf.to_delayed()
#delayed version of pd.DataFrame.apply
delayed_apply = dask.delayed(lambda x: x.apply(generate_varibale_length_series, axis = 1))
#use this function on every delayed object
apply_on_every_partition_delayed = [delayed_apply(d) for d in ddf.to_delayed()]
#calculate the result. This gives a list of pd.DataFrame objects
result = dask.compute(*apply_on_every_partition_delayed)
#concatenate them
result = pd.concat(result)
