#76 Longest Increasing Subsequence

题目描述：

Given a sequence of integers, find the longest increasing subsequence (LIS).

You code should return the length of the LIS.

Have you met this question in a real interview? 

Yes

Clarification

What's the definition of longest increasing subsequence?

• The longest increasing subsequence problem is to find a subsequence of a given sequence in which the subsequence's elements are in sorted order, lowest to highest, and in which the subsequence is as long as possible. This subsequence is not necessarily contiguous, or unique.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_increasing_subsequence

Example

For [5, 4, 1, 2, 3], the LIS is [1, 2, 3], return 3
For [4, 2, 4, 5, 3, 7], the LIS is [2, 4, 5, 7], return 4

Challenge 

Time complexity O(n^2) or O(nlogn)

题目思路：

这题的不确定因素是，由于这个subsequence不一定是连续的，所以我们不知道每个数应该跟谁去比。由于这个不确定因素的存在，就注定了我们需要用两层循环。

然后题目提示我们用dp，那么我们可以用dp[i]去固定其中一个不确定因素，也就是用dp[i]去表示当index i为最后一个数时，它之前的最大LIS是多长。这样，我们用j = 0...i - 1为另一层循环，就可以得到A[i] > A[j]时的dp方程：dp[i] = max(dp[i], dp[j] + 1). 最后，我们通过遍历dp[i]找出最大值，就是整个数组LIS的长度。

Mycode（AC = 10ms）：

class Solution {
public:
    /**
     * @param nums: The integer array
     * @return: The length of LIS (longest increasing subsequence)
     */
    int longestIncreasingSubsequence(vector<int> nums) {
        // write your code here
        if (nums.size() <= 1) return nums.size();
        
        vector<int> dp(nums.size(), 1);
        
        // dp[i] denote if ending index is i, what's the LIS
        // length
        for (int i = 1; i < nums.size(); i++) {
            // for each index i, get its LIS length
            for (int j = 0; j < i; j++) {
                if (nums[j] < nums[i]) {
                    dp[i] = max(dp[i], dp[j] + 1);
                }

            }
        }
        
        // we don't know which ending index has the LIS length,
        // hence need to traverse the dp to find the longest
        // number
        int longest = 1;
        for (int i = 0; i < nums.size(); i++) {
            longest = max(longest, dp[i]);
        }
        
        return longest;
    }
};