Sort tied categorical histogram frequencies alphabetically#684
Merged
kyraman merged 1 commit intoawslabs:masterfrom Mar 25, 2026
Merged
Sort tied categorical histogram frequencies alphabetically#684kyraman merged 1 commit intoawslabs:masterfrom
kyraman merged 1 commit intoawslabs:masterfrom
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SamPom100
approved these changes
Mar 25, 2026
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Description of changes:
Add lexicographic (alphabetical) secondary sort as a tiebreaker when categorical values share the same frequency count in the Histogram analyzer.
Before this change, if two categories had the same count, their ordering was non-deterministic (dependent on Spark's internal partition layout). For example, given Iris species data where "Iris-versicolor" and "Iris-virginica" both appear 50 times, the result could return either order across different runs.
After this change, tied values are sorted alphabetically, so the output is always:
This matches the convention used by tools like pandas
value_counts()and R'stable(), which all use lexicographic ordering as a tiebreaker for equal counts.Note: This change only affects the categorical
Histogramanalyzer. The numericHistogramBinnedanalyzer, which uses equal-width bin edges, is unaffected.By submitting this pull request, I confirm that my contribution is made under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license.