Algorithm to find combination of n numbers with largest sum - algorithm

Question

Problem is simple -
Suppose I have an array of following numbers -
4,1,4,5,7,4,3,1,5
I have to find number of sets of k elements each that can be created from above numbers having largest sum. Two sets are considered to be different if they have at least one different element.
e.g.
if k = 2, then there can be two sets - {7,5} and {7,5}. Note: 5 appears twice in above array.
I think I can start with something like-
1. Sort array
2. Create two arrays. One for different number and an other in parallel for number's occurence.
But I am stuck now. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The algorithm is as follows:
1) Sort elements in descending order.
2) Look at this array. It may look something like this:
a ... a b ... b c ... c d ...
| <- k -> |
Now obviously all elements a and b will be in the sets with the largest sum. You can't replace any of them with a smaller element, because then the sum wouldn't be the largest possible. So you have no choice here, you have to choose all a and b for any of the sets.
On the other hand only some of the elements c will be in those sets. So the answer is just the number of possibilities, to choose c's to fill the positions left in the sets, after you have taken all larger elements. That is the binomial coefficient:
count of c's choose (k - (count of elements larger than c))
For example for an array (already sorted here)
[9, 8, 7, 7, 5, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1]
and k = 6, you must choose 9, 8 and both 7's for every set with the largest sum (which is 41). And then you can choose any two out of the four 5's. So the result will be 4 choose 2 = 6.
With the same array and k = 4, the result would be x choose 0 = 1 (that unique set is {9, 8, 7, 7}), with k = 7 the result would be 4 choose 3 = 4, and with k = 9: 2 choose 1 = 2 (choosing any 4 for the set with the largest sum).

Answer 2

EDIT: I edited the answer, because we figured it out that OP needs to count multisets.
First, find the largest k numbers in the array. This is of course easy, and if k is very small, you can do it in O(k) by performing k linear scans. If k is not so small, you can use a binary heap, or a priority queue or just sort the array to do that which is respectively O(n * log(k)) or O(n * log(n)) when using sorting.
Let assume that you have computed k largest numbers. Of course all sets of size k with the largest sum have to contain exactly these k largest numbers and no more other numbers. On the other hand, any different set doesn't have the largest sum.
Let count[i] be the number of occurrences of number i in the input sequence.
Let occ[i] be the number of occurrences of number i in the largest k numbers.
We can compute these both tables in very different ways, for example using a hash table or if input numbers are small, you can use an array indexed by these numbers.
Let B be the array of distinct numbers from the largest k numbers.
Let m be the size of B.
Now let's compute the answer. We will do it in m steps. After i-th step we will have computed the number of different multisets consisting of the first i numbers from B. At the beginning the result is 1 since there is only one empty multiset. In the i-th step, we will multiply the current result by the number of possible chooses of occ[B[i]] elements from count[B[i]] elements, which is equal to binomial(occ[i], count[i])
For example, let's consider your instance with added one more 7 at the end and k set to 3:
k = 3
A = [4, 1, 4, 5, 7, 4, 3, 1, 5, 7]
The largest three numbers in A are 7, 7, 5
At the beginning we have:
count[7] = 2
count[5] = 2
occ[7] = 2
occ[5] = 1
result = 1
B = [7, 5]
We start with the first element in B which is 7. Its count is 2 and its occ is also 2, so we do:
// binomial(2, 2) is 1
result = result * binomial(2, 2)
Next element in B is 5, its count is 2 and its occ is 1, so we do:
// binomial(2, 1) is 2
result = result * binomial(2, 1)
And the final result is 2, since there are two different multisets [7, 7, 5]

Answer 3

I'd create a sorted dictionary of the frequencies of occurrence of the numbers in the input. Then take the two largest numbers and multiply the number of times they occur.
In C++, it could look something like this:
std::vector<int> inputs { 4, 1, 4, 5, 7, 3, 1, 5};
std::map<int, int> counts;
for (auto i : inputs)
++counts[i];
auto last = counts.rbegin();
int largest_count = *last;
int second_count = *++last;
int set_count = largeest_count * second_count;

Answer 4

You can do the following:
1) Sort the elements in descending order;
2) define variable answer=1;
3) Start from the beginning of the array and for each new value you see, count the number of its occurrence (lets call this variable count). every time do: answer = answer * count. The pseudo-code should look like this.
find_count(Array A, K)
{
sort(A,'descending);
int answer=1;
int count=1;
for (int i=1,j=1; i<K && j<A.length;j++)
{
if(A[i] != A[i-1])
{
answer = answer *count;
i++;
count=1;
}
else
count++;
}
return answer;
}