I am preparing for software development interviews, I always faced the problem in distinguishing the difference between O(logn) and O(nLogn). Can anyone explain me with some examples or share some resource with me. I don't have any code to show. I understand O(Logn) but I haven't understood O(nlogn).
Think of it as O(n*log(n)), i.e. "doing log(n) work n times". For example, searching for an element in a sorted list of length n is O(log(n)). Searching for the element in n different sorted lists, each of length n is O(n*log(n)).
Remember that O(n) is defined relative to some real quantity n. This might be the size of a list, or the number of different elements in a collection. Therefore, every variable that appears inside O(...) represents something interacting to increase the runtime. O(n*m) could be written O(n_1 + n_2 + ... + n_m) and represent the same thing: "doing n, m times".
Let's take a concrete example of this, mergesort. For n input elements: On the very last iteration of our sort, we have two halves of the input, each half size n/2, and each half is sorted. All we have to do is merge them together, which takes n operations. On the next-to-last iteration, we have twice as many pieces (4) each of size n/4. For each of our two pairs of size n/4, we merge the pair together, which takes n/2 operations for a pair (one for each element in the pair, just like before), i.e. n operations for the two pairs.
From here, we can extrapolate that every level of our mergesort takes n operations to merge. The big-O complexity is therefore n times the number of levels. On the last level, the size of the chunks we're merging is n/2. Before that, it's n/4, before that n/8, etc. all the way to size 1. How many times must you divide n by 2 to get 1? log(n). So we have log(n) levels. Therefore, our total runtime is O(n (work per level) * log(n) (number of levels)), n work log(n) times.
Was reading CLRS when I encountered this:
Why do we not ignore the constant k in the big o equations in a. , b. and c.?
In this case, you aren't considering the run time of a single algorithm, but of a family of algorithms parameterized by k. Considering k lets you compare the difference between sorting n/n == 1 list and n/2 2-element lists. Somewhere in the middle, there is a value of k that you want to compute for part (c) so that Θ(nk + n lg(n/k)) and Θ(n lg n) are equal.
Going into more detail, insertion sort is O(n^2) because (roughly speaking) in the worst case, any single insertion could take O(n) time. However, if the sublists have a fixed length k, then you know the insertion step is O(1), independent of how many lists you are sorting. (That is, the bottleneck is no longer in the insertion step, but the merge phase.)
K is not a constant when you compare different algorithms with different values of k.
Will the number of comparisons differ when we take the last element as the pivot element in Quick sort and when we take the first element as the pivot element in the quick sort??
No it will not. In quick sort, what happens is, we chose a pivot element(say x). Then divide the list to 2 parts larger than x and less than x.
Therefore, the number of comparisons change slightly proportional to the recursion depth. That is, the more deeper the recursive function goes, more the number of comparisons to be made to divide the list to 2 parts.
The recursion depth differs - More the value of x can divide the list to similar length parts, lesser will be the recursion depth.
Therefore, the conclusion is, it doesn't matter whether you chose the first or the last element as the pivot, but whether that value can divide the list to 2 similar length lists.
Edit
The more the pivot is close to the median, lesser will be the complexity (O(nlogn)). The more the pivot is close to the max or min of the list, complexity increases (up to O(n^2))
When a first element or last element is chosen as pivot the number of comparisons remain same but it is the worst case as the array is either sorted or reverse sorted.
In every step ,numbers are divided as per the following recurrence.
T(n) = T(n-1) + O(n) and if you solve this relation it will give you the complexity of theta(n^2)
And when you choose median element as pivot it gives a recurrence relationship of
T(n) = 2T(n/2) + \theta(n) which is the best case as it gives complexity of `nlogn`
Is anybody able to give a 'plain english' intuitive, yet formal, explanation of what makes QuickSort n log n? From my understanding it has to make a pass over n items, and it does this log n times...Im not sure how to put it into words why it does this log n times.
Complexity
A Quicksort starts by partitioning the input into two chunks: it chooses a "pivot" value, and partitions the input into those less than the pivot value and those larger than the pivot value (and, of course, any equal to the pivot value have go into one or the other, of course, but for a basic description, it doesn't matter a lot which those end up in).
Since the input (by definition) isn't sorted, to partition it like that, it has to look at every item in the input, so that's an O(N) operation. After it's partitioned the input the first time, it recursively sorts each of those "chunks". Each of those recursive calls looks at every one of its inputs, so between the two calls it ends up visiting every input value (again). So, at the first "level" of partitioning, we have one call that looks at every input item. At the second level, we have two partitioning steps, but between the two, they (again) look at every input item. Each successive level has more individual partitioning steps, but in total the calls at each level look at all the input items.
It continues partitioning the input into smaller and smaller pieces until it reaches some lower limit on the size of a partition. The smallest that could possibly be would be a single item in each partition.
Ideal Case
In the ideal case we hope each partitioning step breaks the input in half. The "halves" probably won't be precisely equal, but if we choose the pivot well, they should be pretty close. To keep the math simple, let's assume perfect partitioning, so we get exact halves every time.
In this case, the number of times we can break it in half will be the base-2 logarithm of the number of inputs. For example, given 128 inputs, we get partition sizes of 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, and 1. That's 7 levels of partitioning (and yes log2(128) = 7).
So, we have log(N) partitioning "levels", and each level has to visit all N inputs. So, log(N) levels times N operations per level gives us O(N log N) overall complexity.
Worst Case
Now let's revisit that assumption that each partitioning level will "break" the input precisely in half. Depending on how good a choice of partitioning element we make, we might not get precisely equal halves. So what's the worst that could happen? The worst case is a pivot that's actually the smallest or largest element in the input. In this case, we do an O(N) partitioning level, but instead of getting two halves of equal size, we've ended up with one partition of one element, and one partition of N-1 elements. If that happens for every level of partitioning, we obviously end up doing O(N) partitioning levels before even partition is down to one element.
This gives the technically correct big-O complexity for Quicksort (big-O officially refers to the upper bound on complexity). Since we have O(N) levels of partitioning, and each level requires O(N) steps, we end up with O(N * N) (i.e., O(N2)) complexity.
Practical implementations
As a practical matter, a real implementation will typically stop partitioning before it actually reaches partitions of a single element. In a typical case, when a partition contains, say, 10 elements or fewer, you'll stop partitioning and and use something like an insertion sort (since it's typically faster for a small number of elements).
Modified Algorithms
More recently other modifications to Quicksort have been invented (e.g., Introsort, PDQ Sort) which prevent that O(N2) worst case. Introsort does so by keeping track of the current partitioning "level", and when/if it goes too deep, it'll switch to a heap sort, which is slower than Quicksort for typical inputs, but guarantees O(N log N) complexity for any inputs.
PDQ sort adds another twist to that: since Heap sort is slower, it tries to avoid switching to heap sort if possible To to that, if it looks like it's getting poor pivot values, it'll randomly shuffle some of the inputs before choosing a pivot. Then, if (and only if) that fails to produce sufficiently better pivot values, it'll switch to using a Heap sort instead.
Each partitioning operation takes O(n) operations (one pass on the array).
In average, each partitioning divides the array to two parts (which sums up to log n operations). In total we have O(n * log n) operations.
I.e. in average log n partitioning operations and each partitioning takes O(n) operations.
There's a key intuition behind logarithms:
The number of times you can divide a number n by a constant before reaching 1 is O(log n).
In other words, if you see a runtime that has an O(log n) term, there's a good chance that you'll find something that repeatedly shrinks by a constant factor.
In quicksort, what's shrinking by a constant factor is the size of the largest recursive call at each level. Quicksort works by picking a pivot, splitting the array into two subarrays of elements smaller than the pivot and elements bigger than the pivot, then recursively sorting each subarray.
If you pick the pivot randomly, then there's a 50% chance that the chosen pivot will be in the middle 50% of the elements, which means that there's a 50% chance that the larger of the two subarrays will be at most 75% the size of the original. (Do you see why?)
Therefore, a good intuition for why quicksort runs in time O(n log n) is the following: each layer in the recursion tree does O(n) work, and since each recursive call has a good chance of reducing the size of the array by at least 25%, we'd expect there to be O(log n) layers before you run out of elements to throw away out of the array.
This assumes, of course, that you're choosing pivots randomly. Many implementations of quicksort use heuristics to try to get a nice pivot without too much work, and those implementations can, unfortunately, lead to poor overall runtimes in the worst case. #Jerry Coffin's excellent answer to this question talks about some variations on quicksort that guarantee O(n log n) worst-case behavior by switching which sorting algorithms are used, and that's a great place to look for more information about this.
Well, it's not always n(log n). It is the performance time when the pivot chosen is approximately in the middle. In worst case if you choose the smallest or the largest element as the pivot then the time will be O(n^2).
To visualize 'n log n', you can assume the pivot to be element closest to the average of all the elements in the array to be sorted.
This would partition the array into 2 parts of roughly same length.
On both of these you apply the quicksort procedure.
As in each step you go on halving the length of the array, you will do this for log n(base 2) times till you reach length = 1 i.e a sorted array of 1 element.
Break the sorting algorithm in two parts. First is the partitioning and second recursive call. Complexity of partioning is O(N) and complexity of recursive call for ideal case is O(logN). For example, if you have 4 inputs then there will be 2(log4) recursive call. Multiplying both you get O(NlogN). It is a very basic explanation.
In-fact you need to find the position of all the N elements(pivot),but the maximum number of comparisons is logN for each element (the first is N,second pivot N/2,3rd N/4..assuming pivot is the median element)
In the case of the ideal scenario, the first level call, places 1 element in its proper position. there are 2 calls at the second level taking O(n) time combined but it puts 2 elements in their proper position. in the same way. there will be 4 calls at the 3rd level which would take O(n) combined time but will place 4 elements into their proper position. so the depth of the recursive tree will be log(n) and at each depth, O(n) time is needed for all recursive calls. So time complexity is O(nlogn).
this is a homework question, and I'm not that at finding the complixity but I'm trying my best!
Three-way partitioning is a modification of quicksort that partitions elements into groups smaller than, equal to, and larger than the pivot. Only the groups of smaller and larger elements need to be recursively sorted. Show that if there are N items but only k unique values (in other words there are many duplicates), then the running time of this modification to quicksort is O(Nk).
my try:
on the average case:
the tree subroutines will be at these indices:
I assume that the subroutine that have duplicated items will equal (n-k)
first: from 0 - to(i-1)
Second: i - (i+(n-k-1))
third: (i+n-k) - (n-1)
number of comparisons = (n-k)-1
So,
T(n) = (n-k)-1 + Sigma from 0 until (n-k-1) [ T(i) + T (i-k)]
then I'm not sure how I'm gonna continue :S
It might be a very bad start though :$
Hope to find a help
First of all, you shouldn't look at the average case since the upper bound of O(nk) can be proved for the worst case, which is a stronger statement.
You should look at the maximum possible depth of recursion. In normal quicksort, the maximum depth is n. For each level, the total number of operations done is O(n), which gives O(n^2) total in the worst case.
Here, it's not hard to prove that the maximum possible depth is k (since one unique value will be removed at each level), which leads to O(nk) total.
I don't have a formal education in complexity. But if you think about it as a mathematical problem, you can prove it as a mathematical proof.
For all sorting algorithms, the best case scenario will always be O(n) for n elements because to sort n elements you have to consider each one atleast once. Now, for your particular optimisation of quicksort, what you have done is simplified the issue because now, you are only sorting unique values: All the values that are the same as the pivot are already considered sorted, and by virtue of its nature, quicksort will guarantee that every unique value will feature as the pivot at some point in the operation, so this eliminates duplicates.
This means for an N size list, quicksort must perform some operation N times (once for every position in the list), and because it is trying to sort the list, that operation is trying to find the position of that value in the list, but because you are effectively dealing with just unique values, and there are k of those, the quicksort algorithm must perform k comparisons for each element. So it performs Nk operations for an N sized list with k unique elements.
To summarise:
This algorithm eliminates checking against duplicate values.
But all sorting algorithms must look at every value in the list at least once. N operations
For every value in the list the operation is to find its position relative to other values in the list.
Because duplicates get removed, this leaves only k values to check against.
O(Nk)