215. Kth Largest Element in an Array

Find the kth largest element in an unsorted array. Note that it is the kth largest element in the sorted order, not the kth distinct element.

For example,
Given [3,2,1,5,6,4] and k = 2, return 5.

Note: 
You may assume k is always valid, 1 ≤ k ≤ array's length.

Credits:
Special thanks to @mithmatt for adding this problem and creating all test cases.

这里有四种方法解题。

This problem is well known and quite often can be found in various text books.

You can take a couple of approaches to actually solve it:

• O(N lg N) running time + O(1) memory

The simplest approach is to sort the entire input array and then access the element by it's index (which is O(1)) operation:

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public int findKthLargest(int[] nums, int k) {
        final int N = nums.length;
        Arrays.sort(nums);
        return nums[N - k];
}

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• O(N lg K) running time + O(K) memory

Other possibility is to use a min oriented priority queue that will store the K-th largest values. The algorithm iterates over the whole input and maintains the size of priority queue.

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public int findKthLargest(int[] nums, int k) {

    final PriorityQueue<Integer> pq = new PriorityQueue<>();
    for(int val : nums) {
        pq.offer(val);

        if(pq.size() > k) {
            pq.poll();
        }
    }
    return pq.peek();
}

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• O(N) best case / O(N^2) worst case running time + O(1) memory

The smart approach for this problem is to use the selection algorithm (based on the partion method - the same one as used in quicksort).

---

public int findKthLargest(int[] nums, int k) {

        k = nums.length - k;
        int lo = 0;
        int hi = nums.length - 1;
        while (lo < hi) {
            final int j = partition(nums, lo, hi);
            if(j < k) {
                lo = j + 1;
            } else if (j > k) {
                hi = j - 1;
            } else {
                break;
            }
        }
        return nums[k];
    }

    private int partition(int[] a, int lo, int hi) {

        int i = lo;
        int j = hi + 1;
        while(true) {
            while(i < hi && less(a[++i], a[lo]));
            while(j > lo && less(a[lo], a[--j]));
            if(i >= j) {
                break;
            }
            exch(a, i, j);
        }
        exch(a, lo, j);
        return j;
    }

    private void exch(int[] a, int i, int j) {
        final int tmp = a[i];
        a[i] = a[j];
        a[j] = tmp;
    }

    private boolean less(int v, int w) {
        return v < w;
    }

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O(N) guaranteed running time + O(1) space

So how can we improve the above solution and make it O(N) guaranteed? The answer is quite simple, we can randomize the input, so that even when the worst case input would be provided the algorithm wouldn't be affected. So all what it is needed to be done is to shuffle the input.

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public int findKthLargest(int[] nums, int k) {

        shuffle(nums);
        k = nums.length - k;
        int lo = 0;
        int hi = nums.length - 1;
        while (lo < hi) {
            final int j = partition(nums, lo, hi);
            if(j < k) {
                lo = j + 1;
            } else if (j > k) {
                hi = j - 1;
            } else {
                break;
            }
        }
        return nums[k];
    }

private void shuffle(int a[]) {

        final Random random = new Random();
        for(int ind = 1; ind < a.length; ind++) {
            final int r = random.nextInt(ind + 1);
            exch(a, ind, r);
        }
    }

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There is also worth mentioning the Blum-Floyd-Pratt-Rivest-Tarjan algorithm that has a guaranteed O(N) running time.