Algorithmic Analysis and interpretation of partitions - algorithm

So I've been working on this problem and have been stuck forever.
I don't feel like I've made any progress so any help would be great.
For i. I thought it might be the probability of being on the left of the partition multiplied by the probability of being on the right partition. So something like (q/n)* ((n-q)/n). However if I were to do this, I would get the exact same thing for iii. Which doesn't seem correct.
Am I going about this correctly?
I also am unsure how to find the expected number of elements for the other parts. What does that even mean? what equation would I make to solve this?
How are we supposed to know the expected if it could really be anything?
I know that the qth position is sorted so how would I use that to solve it?

First, assume each permutation is equally likely, and that all the elements in the array are different.
Any particular element that's originally to the left of q, is equally likely to go in any of the remaining places in the array. That means it's got probability 1 - q/n of moving to the right. Similarly, an element originally to the right of q has probability (q - 1)/n of moving to the left. Because of the way the partition has been implemented, an element never moves from left to a different place on the left, or right to a different place on the right.
Expectation is linear, and the expected number of moves of a single element is simply its probability of moving. Therefore the expected number of moves from right to left is the product of the probability of moving times the number of elements originally on the right, or (n - q)(q - 1)/n. Similarly, the expected number of moves from left to right is (q - 1)(1 - q/n). So given a particular q, the expectation is the sum of these two, which is 2(n - q)(q - 1)/n.
Now, to get the overall expected number of moves excluding the movement of the partition element, we have to sum up over q, each q being equally likely:
1/n * sum(q=0 to n-1) 2(n - q)(q - 1) / n.
Simplifying, this equals (n^2 - 3n - 4) / 3n.
Finally, we have to add the expected number of moves of the partition which is (n - 1)/n (since it moves except when it happens to be the smallest element in the array).
Simplifying again, this gives (n^2 - 2n - 5) / n.
(Assuming I didn't make an error in calculation along the way!)

Like #Anonymous, I'll assume the elements are all different and the permutations are equally likely.
Let's address the first question first and let's solve the inverse problem. That is:
i. What is the probability that no element moved from the left to the right of q.
Before finding this out, I'd like to point out that if no element moved from the left to the right, therefore no element moved from the right to the left either. This implies that the answer to questions i. and iii. are the same, and so are the answers to questions ii. and iv.. In fact, this is easy to establish by symmetry.
So, let's calculate that probability. Let's divide the possible cases by the value of q and sum up. For any given q (q starts from 1), you have q-1 numbers that are smaller than it. You also have q-1 slots on the left and n-q slots on the right. To total possible permutations of the n-1 numbers (excluding the pivot which is at position q) is (n-1)!. The number of cases where the smaller q-1 numbers are on the left, and the larger n-q numbers are on the right is (q-1)!(n-q)!. The probability of this happening is therefore:
(q-1)!(n-q)!
------------
(n-1)!
To get the total chances, we sum all possible cases divided by n (Note: what we calculated was a conditional probability. The set of possibilities can be divided by the value of q into distinct subsets whose union covers the whole set. In other words, the complete probability can be calculated as the sum of probabilities in each subset multiplied by the probability of that subset. The probability of the pivot ending in location q is 1/n).
n
1 ___ (q-1)!(n-q)!
p = --- \ ------------
n /__ (n-1)!
q=1
This was the chance that no element moves from the left to the right. The chance of having at least one element move is thus 1-p. This could also be rewritten as:
n
1 ___ (q-1)!(n-q)!
p_1 = --- \ (1 - ------------)
n /__ (n-1)!
q=1
where p_1 is the probability for question i.. Note that the term inside the sigma is indeed the chance for a given q that at least some element moved from left to right. Let's call this p_1q as the probability for question i. given a fixed q.
To answer the second question, we know that the expected value would be the sum of the expected value given a q multiplied by the chances for that q. Chances for q being any value is 1/n, as stated before. Now, what is the expected value of number of elements on the left that need to move to right given some q? This is itself the sum of different values multiplied by their probability.
Let's say given a q, there are k values on the left that need to move to the right. In other words, there are k values larger than the pivot at position q and q-k-1 values smaller than the pivot. What are these chances? You need to calculate this again with combinatorics, where k of the q-1 elements on the left are selected from the q-1 values smaller than the pivot. Unfortunately, this answer is taking up longer than I expected and I really need to get back to work (plus, typing equations without latex math is painful). Hope this would help you continue solving this problem yourself.

Related

Reservoir sampling: why is it selected uniformly at random

I understand how the algorithm works. However I don't understand why is it correct. Assume we need to select only one element. Here's the proof that I've found
at every step N, keep the next element in the stream with probability 1/N. This means that we have an (N-1)/N probability of keeping the element we are currently holding on to, which means that we keep it with probability (1/(N-1)) * (N-1)/N = 1/N.
I understand everything except for the last part. Why do we multiply the probabilities?
Because Pr[A AND B] == Pr[A] * Pr[B], assuming that A and B are independent (as they are here). The probability of choosing the element AND not replacing it later, is the product of those two possibilities' probabilities.

Google Interview : Find the maximum sum of a polygon [closed]

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Given a polygon with N vertexes and N edges. There is an int number(could be negative) on every vertex and an operation in set (*,+) on every edge. Every time, we remove an edge E from the polygon, merge the two vertexes linked by the edge (V1,V2) to a new vertex with value: V1 op(E) V2. The last case would be two vertexes with two edges, the result is the bigger one.
Return the max result value can be gotten from a given polygon.
For the last case we might not need two merge as the other number could be negative, so in that case we would just return the larger number.
How I am approaching the problem:
p[i,j] denotes the maximum value we can obtain by merging nodes from labelled i to j.
p[i,i] = v[i] -- base case
p[i,j] = p[i,k] operator in between p[k+1,j] , for k between i to j-1.
and then p[0,n] will be my answer.
Second point , i will have to start from all the vertices and do the same as above as this will be cyclic n vertices n edges.
The time complexity for this is n^3 *n i.e n^4 .
Can i do better then this ?
As you have identified (tagged) correctly, this indeed is very similar to the matrix multiplication problem (in what order do I multiply matrixes in order to do it quickly).
This can be solved polynomially using a dynamic algorithm.
I'm going to instead solve a similar, more classic (and identical) problem, given a formula with numbers, addition and multiplications, what way of parenthesizing it gives the maximal value, for example
6+1 * 2 becomes (6+1)*2 which is more than 6+(1*2).
Let us denote our input a1 to an real numbers and o(1),...o(n-1) either * or +. Our approach will work as follows, we will observe the subproblem F(i,j) which represents the maximal formula (after parenthasizing) for a1,...aj. We will create a table of such subproblems and observe that F(1,n) is exactly the result we were looking for.
Define
F(i,j)
- If i>j return 0 //no sub-formula of negative length
- If i=j return ai // the maximal formula for one number is the number
- If i<j return the maximal value for all m between i (including) and j (not included) of:
F(i,m) (o(m)) F(m+1,j) //check all places for possible parenthasis insertion
This goes through all possible options. TProof of correctness is done by induction on the size n=j-i and is pretty trivial.
Lets go through runtime analysis:
If we do not save the values dynamically for smaller subproblems this runs pretty slow, however we can make this algorithm perform relatively fast in O(n^3)
We create a n*n table T in which the cell at index i,j contains F(i,j) filling F(i,i) and F(i,j) for j smaller than i is done in O(1) for each cell since we can calculate these values directly, then we go diagonally and fill F(i+1,i+1) (which we can do quickly since we already know all the previous values in the recursive formula), we repeat this n times for n diagonals (all the diagonals in the table really) and filling each cell takes (O(n)), since each cell has O(n) cells we fill each diagonals in O(n^2) meaning we fill all the table in O(n^3). After filling the table we obviously know F(1,n) which is the solution to your problem.
Now back to your problem
If you translate the polygon into n different formulas (one for starting at each vertex) and run the algorithm for formula values on it, you get exactly the value you want.
I think you can reduce the need for a brute force search. For example: if there is a chain of
x + y + z
You can replace it with a single vertex whose value is the sum, you can't do better than that. You need to do the multiplying after the addition when you're dealing with +ve integers. So if it's all positive then simply reduce all + chains and then mutliply.
So that leaves the cases where there are -ve numbers. Seems to me that the strategy for a single -ve number is pretty obvious, for two -ve numbers there are a few cases (remembering that - x - is positive) and for more than 2 -ve numbers it seems to get tricky :-)

Algorithm for finding path combinations?

Imagine you have a dancing robot in n-dimensional euclidean space starting at origin P_0 = (0,0,...,0).
The robot can make m types of dance moves D_1, D_2, ..., D_m
D_i is an n-vector of integers (D_i_1, D_i_2, ..., D_i_n)
If the robot makes dance move i than its position changes by D_i:
P_{t+1} = P_t + D_i
The robot can make any of the dance moves as many times as he wants and in any order.
Let a k-dance be defined as a sequence of k dance moves.
Clearly there are m^k possible k-dances.
We are interested to know the set of possible end positions of a k-dance, and for each end position, how many k-dances end at that location.
One way to do this is as follows:
P0 = (0, 0, ..., 0);
S[0][P0] = 1
for I in 1 to k
for J in 1 to m
for P in S[I-1]
S[I][P + D_J] += S[I][P]
Now S[k][Q] will tell you how many k-dances end at position Q
Assume that n, m, |D_i| are small (less than 5) and k is less than 40.
Is there a faster way? Can we calculate S[k][Q] "directly" somehow with some sort of linear algebra related trick? or some other approach?
You could create an adjacency matrix that would contain dance-move transitions in your space (the part of it that's reachable in k moves, otherwise it would be infinite). Then, the P_0 row of n-th power of this matrix contains the S[k] values.
The matrix in question quickly gets enormous, something like (k*(max(D_i_j)-min(D_i_j)))^n (every dimension can be halved if Q is close to origin), but that's true for your S matrix as well
Since dance moves are interchangable you can assume that for a i < j the robot first makes all the D_i moves before the D_j moves, thus reducing the number of combinations to actually calculate.
If you keep track of the number of times each dance move was made calculating the total number of combinations should be easy.
Since the 1-dimensional problem is closely related to the subset sum problem, you could probably take a similar approach - find all of the combinations of dance vectors that add together to have the correct first coordinate with exactly k moves; then take that subset of combinations and check to see which of those have the right sum for the second, and take the subset which matches both and check it for the third, and so on.
In this way, you get to at least only have to perform a very simple addition for the extremely painful O(n^k) step. It will indeed find all of the vectors which will hit a given value.

Partition a set into k groups with minimum number of moves

You have a set of n objects for which integer positions are given. A group of objects is a set of objects at the same position (not necessarily all the objects at that position: there might be multiple groups at a single position). The objects can be moved to the left or right, and the goal is to move these objects so as to form k groups, and to do so with the minimum distance moved.
For example:
With initial positions at [4,4,7], and k = 3: the minimum cost is 0.
[4,4,7] and k = 2: minimum cost is 0
[1,2,5,7] and k = 2: minimum cost is 1 + 2 = 3
I've been trying to use a greedy approach (by calculating which move would be shortest) but that wouldn't work because every move involves two elements which could be moved either way. I haven't been able to formulate a dynamic programming approach as yet but I'm working on it.
This problem is a one-dimensional instance of the k-medians problem, which can be stated as follows. Given a set of points x_1...x_n, partition these points into k sets S_1...S_k and choose k locations y_1...y_k in a way that minimizes the sum over all x_i of |x_i - y_f(i)|, where y_f(i) is the location corresponding of the set to which x_i is assigned.
Due to the fact that the median is the population minimizer for absolute distance (i.e. L_1 norm), it follows that each location y_j will be the median of the elements x in the corresponding set S_j (hence the name k-medians). Since you are looking at integer values, there is the technicality that if S_j contains an even number of elements, the median might not be an integer, but in such cases choosing either the next integer above or below the median will give the same sum of absolute distances.
The standard heuristic for solving k-medians (and the related and more common k-means problem) is iterative, but this is not guaranteed to produce an optimal or even good solution. Solving the k-medians problem for general metric spaces is NP-hard, and finding efficient approximations for k-medians is an open research problem. Googling "k-medians approximation", for example, will lead to a bunch of papers giving approximation schemes.
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~sudipto/mypapers/kmedian_jcss.pdf
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs468-06-winter/Papers/arr-clustering.pdf
In one dimension things become easier, and you can use a dynamic programming approach. A DP solution to the related one-dimensional k-means problem is described in this paper, and the source code in R is available here. See the paper for details, but the idea is essentially the same as what #SajalJain proposed, and can easily be adapted to solve the k-medians problem rather than k-means. For j<=k and m<=n let D(j,m) denote the cost of an optimal j-medians solution to x_1...x_m, where the x_i are assumed to be in sorted order. We have the recurrence
D(j,m) = min (D(j-1,q) + Cost(x_{q+1},...,x_m)
where q ranges from j-1 to m-1 and Cost is equal to the sum of absolute distances from the median. With a naive O(n) implementation of Cost, this would yield an O(n^3k) DP solution to the whole problem. However, this can be improved to O(n^2k) due to the fact that the Cost can be updated in constant time rather than computed from scratch every time, using the fact that, for a sorted sequence:
Cost(x_1,...,x_h) = Cost(x_2,...,x_h) + median(x_1...x_h)-x_1 if h is odd
Cost(x_1,...,x_h) = Cost(x_2,...,x_h) + median(x_2...x_h)-x_1 if h is even
See the writeup for more details. Except for the fact that the update of the Cost function is different, the implementation will be the same for k-medians as for k-means.
http://journal.r-project.org/archive/2011-2/RJournal_2011-2_Wang+Song.pdf
as I understand, the problems is:
we have n points on a line.
we want to place k position on the line. I call them destinations.
move each of n points to one of the k destinations so the sum of distances is minimum. I call this sum, total cost.
destinations can overlap.
An obvious fact is that for each point we should look for the nearest destinations on the left and the nearest destinations on the right and choose the nearest.
Another important fact is all destinations should be on the points. because we can move them on the line to right or to left to reach a point without increasing total distance.
By these facts consider following DP solution:
DP[i][j] means the minimum total cost needed for the first i point, when we can use only j destinations, and have to put a destination on the i-th point.
to calculate DP[i][j] fix the destination before the i-th point (we have i choice), and for each choice (for example k-th point) calculate the distance needed for points between the i-th point and the new point added (k-th point). add this with DP[k][j - 1] and find the minimum for all k.
the calculation of initial states (e.g. j = 1) and final answer is left as an exercise!
Task 0 - sort the position of the objects in non-decreasing order
Let us define 'center' as the position of the object where it is shifted to.
Now we have two observations;
For N positions the 'center' would be the position which is nearest to the mean of these N positions. Example, let 1,3,6,10 be the positions. Then mean = 5. Nearest position is 6. Hence the center for these elements is 6. This gives us the position with minimum cost of moving when all elements need to be grouped into 1 group.
Let N positions be grouped into K groups "optimally". When N+1 th object is added, then it will disturb only the K th group, i.e, first K-1 groups will remain unchanged.
From these observations, we build a dynamic programming approach.
Let Cost[i][k] and Center[i][k] be two 2D arrays.
Cost[i][k] = minimum cost when first 'i' objects are partitioned into 'k' groups
Center[i][k] stores the center of the 'i-th' object when Cost[i][k] is computed.
Let {L} be the elements from i-L,i-L+1,..i-1 which have the same center.
(Center[i-L][k] = Center[i-L+1][k] = ... = Center[i-1][k]) These are the only objects that need to be considered in the computation for i-th element (from observation 2)
Now
Cost[i][k] will be
min(Cost[i-1][k-1] , Cost[i-L-1][k-1] + computecost(i-L, i-L+1, ... ,i))
Update Center[i-L ... i][k]
computecost() can be found trivially by finding the center (from observation 1)
Time Complexity:
Sorting O(NlogN)
Total Cost Computation Matrix = Total elements * Computecost = O(NK * N)
Total = O(NlogN + N*NK) = O(N*NK)
Let's look at k=1.
For k=1 and n odd, all points should move to the center point. For k=1 and n even, all points should move to either of the center points or any spot between them. By 'center' I mean in terms of number of points to either side, i.e. the median.
You can see this because if you select a target spot, x, with more points to its right than it's left, then a new target 1 to the right of x would result in a cost reduction (unless there is exactly one more point to the right than the left and the target spot is a point, in which case n is even and the target is on/between the two center points).
If your points are already sorted, this is an O(1) operation. If not, I believe it's O(n) (via an order statistic algorithm).
Once you've found the spot that all points are moving to, it's O(n) to find the cost.
Thus regardless of whether the points are sorted or not, this is O(n).

Revisit: 2D Array Sorted Along X and Y Axis

So, this is a common interview question. There's already a topic up, which I have read, but it's dead, and no answer was ever accepted. On top of that, my interests lie in a slightly more constrained form of the question, with a couple practical applications.
Given a two dimensional array such that:
Elements are unique.
Elements are sorted along the x-axis and the y-axis.
Neither sort predominates, so neither sort is a secondary sorting parameter.
As a result, the diagonal is also sorted.
All of the sorts can be thought of as moving in the same direction. That is to say that they are all ascending, or that they are all descending.
Technically, I think as long as you have a >/=/< comparator, any total ordering should work.
Elements are numeric types, with a single-cycle comparator.
Thus, memory operations are the dominating factor in a big-O analysis.
How do you find an element? Only worst case analysis matters.
Solutions I am aware of:
A variety of approaches that are:
O(nlog(n)), where you approach each row separately.
O(nlog(n)) with strong best and average performance.
One that is O(n+m):
Start in a non-extreme corner, which we will assume is the bottom right.
Let the target be J. Cur Pos is M.
If M is greater than J, move left.
If M is less than J, move up.
If you can do neither, you are done, and J is not present.
If M is equal to J, you are done.
Originally found elsewhere, most recently stolen from here.
And I believe I've seen one with a worst-case O(n+m) but a optimal case of nearly O(log(n)).
What I am curious about:
Right now, I have proved to my satisfaction that naive partitioning attack always devolves to nlog(n). Partitioning attacks in general appear to have a optimal worst-case of O(n+m), and most do not terminate early in cases of absence. I was also wondering, as a result, if an interpolation probe might not be better than a binary probe, and thus it occurred to me that one might think of this as a set intersection problem with a weak interaction between sets. My mind cast immediately towards Baeza-Yates intersection, but I haven't had time to draft an adaptation of that approach. However, given my suspicions that optimality of a O(N+M) worst case is provable, I thought I'd just go ahead and ask here, to see if anyone could bash together a counter-argument, or pull together a recurrence relation for interpolation search.
Here's a proof that it has to be at least Omega(min(n,m)). Let n >= m. Then consider the matrix which has all 0s at (i,j) where i+j < m, all 2s where i+j >= m, except for a single (i,j) with i+j = m which has a 1. This is a valid input matrix, and there are m possible placements for the 1. No query into the array (other than the actual location of the 1) can distinguish among those m possible placements. So you'll have to check all m locations in the worst case, and at least m/2 expected locations for any randomized algorithm.
One of your assumptions was that matrix elements have to be unique, and I didn't do that. It is easy to fix, however, because you just pick a big number X=n*m, replace all 0s with unique numbers less than X, all 2s with unique numbers greater than X, and 1 with X.
And because it is also Omega(lg n) (counting argument), it is Omega(m + lg n) where n>=m.
An optimal O(m+n) solution is to start at the top-left corner, that has minimal value. Move diagonally downwards to the right until you hit an element whose value >= value of the given element. If the element's value is equal to that of the given element, return found as true.
Otherwise, from here we can proceed in two ways.
Strategy 1:
Move up in the column and search for the given element until we reach the end. If found, return found as true
Move left in the row and search for the given element until we reach the end. If found, return found as true
return found as false
Strategy 2:
Let i denote the row index and j denote the column index of the diagonal element we have stopped at. (Here, we have i = j, BTW). Let k = 1.
Repeat the below steps until i-k >= 0
Search if a[i-k][j] is equal to the given element. if yes, return found as true.
Search if a[i][j-k] is equal to the given element. if yes, return found as true.
Increment k
1 2 4 5 6
2 3 5 7 8
4 6 8 9 10
5 8 9 10 11

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