What I'm trying to achieve is continuously add more values to a set and keep them as far apart from each other as possible. I'm sure there must be several algorithms out there to solve this problem, but I'm probably just not searching with the right terms. If someone could point me to a solution (doesn't need to be a particularly efficient one) that would be great.
Effectively, given an set of values S, within a range Min-Max, I need to calculate a new value V, within the same range, such that the sum of distances between V and all values in S gets maximized.
It's easy to show that possible candidates for V are either an already existing value of S or the minimum/maximum. Proof: Let S_1, S_2, ..., S_n be the sorted sequence of S, including min and max. If you choose S_i < V < S_{i+1}, then the sum sum of distances can be achieved with either V = S_i or V = S_{i+1}, depending on the number of points on the left and the right.
This observation yields an O(n^2) algorithm that just checks every potential candidate in S. It can be improved to O(n) by computing prefix sums upfront to compute the sum of distances in O(1) per element.
In general, since each element contributes two linear cost functions to the domain of possible values, this problem can be solved in O(log n) per query. You just need a data structure that can maintain a list of linear function segments and returns the point with maximum sum. A balanced binary search tree with some clever augmentation and lazy updates can solve this. Whether this is necessary or not of course depends on the number of elements and the number of queries you expect to perform.
I don't think there is a silver bullet solution to your problem, but this is how I would go about solving it generally. First, you need to define a function sumDistance() which takes in a new value V along with all the values in the current set, and outputs the sum of the distances between V and each value in the set.
Next, you can iterate over the domain d of sumDistance(), where Min <= d <= Max, and keep track of the sums for each value V in the domain. When you encounter a new largest sum, then record it. The V value which gave you the largest sum is the value you retain and add to your set.
This algorithm can be repeated for each new value you wish to add. Note that because this is essentially a one dimensional optimization problem, the running time should not be too bad so your first attempt might be good enough.
Assuming the distance d(a,b) = |a-b| then one of min and max will always yield a maximum.
Proof:
Let's assume you have V that is not at an end point. You then have n1 values that are lower and n2 values that are higher. The total distance at the minimum will be at least (n1 - n2) * (max - V) bigger and the total distance at the maximum will be at least (n2 - n1) * (V - min) bigger.
Since at least one of n1 - n2 and n2 - n1 must be non-negative, a maximum can always be found at one of the end points.
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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 :-)
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.
Given an n×n matrix of real numbers. You are allowed to erase any number (from 0 to n) of rows and any number (from 0 to n) of columns, and after that the sum of the remaining entries is computed. Come up with an algorithm which finds out which rows and columns to erase in order to maximize that sum.
The problem is NP-hard. (So you should not expect a polynomial-time algorithm for solving this problem. There could still be (non-polynomial time) algorithms that are slightly better than brute-force, though.) The idea behind the proof of NP-hardness is that if we could solve this problem, then we could solve the the clique problem in a general graph. (The maximum-clique problem is to find the largest set of pairwise connected vertices in a graph.)
Specifically, given any graph with n vertices, let's form the matrix A with entries a[i][j] as follows:
a[i][j] = 1 for i == j (the diagonal entries)
a[i][j] = 0 if the edge (i,j) is present in the graph (and i≠j)
a[i][j] = -n-1 if the edge (i,j) is not present in the graph.
Now suppose we solve the problem of removing some rows and columns (or equivalently, keeping some rows and columns) so that the sum of the entries in the matrix is maximized. Then the answer gives the maximum clique in the graph:
Claim: In any optimal solution, there is no row i and column j kept for which the edge (i,j) is not present in the graph. Proof: Since a[i][j] = -n-1 and the sum of all the positive entries is at most n, picking (i,j) would lead to a negative sum. (Note that deleting all rows and columns would give a better sum, of 0.)
Claim: In (some) optimal solution, the set of rows and columns kept is the same. This is because starting with any optimal solution, we can simply remove all rows i for which column i has not been kept, and vice-versa. Note that since the only positive entries are the diagonal ones, we do not decrease the sum (and by the previous claim, we do not increase it either).
All of which means that if the graph has a maximum clique of size k, then our matrix problem has a solution with sum k, and vice-versa. Therefore, if we could solve our initial problem in polynomial time, then the clique problem would also be solved in polynomial time. This proves that the initial problem is NP-hard. (Actually, it is easy to see that the decision version of the initial problem — is there a way of removing some rows and columns so that the sum is at least k — is in NP, so the (decision version of the) initial problem is actually NP-complete.)
Well the brute force method goes something like this:
For n rows there are 2n subsets.
For n columns there are 2n subsets.
For an n x n matrix there are 22n subsets.
0 elements is a valid subset but obviously if you have 0 rows or 0 columns the total is 0 so there are really 22n-2+1 subsets but that's no different.
So you can work out each combination by brute force as an O(an) algorithm. Fast. :)
It would be quicker to work out what the maximum possible value is and you do that by adding up all the positive numbers in the grid. If those numbers happen to form a valid sub-matrix (meaning you can create that set by removing rows and/or columns) then there's your answer.
Implicit in this is that if none of the numbers are negative then the complete matrix is, by definition, the answer.
Also, knowing what the highest possible maximum is possibly allows you to shortcut the brute force evaluation since if you get any combination equal to that maximum then that is your answer and you can stop checking.
Also if all the numbers are non-positive, the answer is the maximum value as you can reduce the matrix to a 1 x 1 matrix with that 1 value in it, by definition.
Here's an idea: construct 2n-1 n x m matrices where 1 <= m <= n. Process them one after the other. For each n x m matrix you can calculate:
The highest possible maximum sum (as per above); and
Whether no numbers are positive allowing you to shortcut the answer.
if (1) is below the currently calculate highest maximum sum then you can discard this n x m matrix. If (2) is true then you just need a simple comparison to the current highest maximum sum.
This is generally referred to as a pruning technique.
What's more you can start by saying that the highest number in the n x n matrix is the starting highest maximum sum since obviously it can be a 1 x 1 matrix.
I'm sure you could tweak this into a (slightly more) efficient recursive tree-based search algorithm with the above tests effectively allowing you to eliminate (hopefully many) unnecessary searches.
We can improve on Cletus's generalized brute-force solution by modelling this as a directed graph. The initial matrix is the start node of the graph; its leaves are all the matrices missing one row or column, and so forth. It's a graph rather than a tree, because the node for the matrix without both the first column and row will have two parents - the nodes with just the first column or row missing.
We can optimize our solution by turning the graph into a tree: There's never any point exploring a submatrix with a column or row deleted that comes before the one we deleted to get to the current node, as that submatrix will be arrived at anyway.
This is still a brute-force search, of course - but we've eliminated the duplicate cases where we remove the same rows in different orders.
Here's an example implementation in Python:
def maximize_sum(m):
frontier = [(m, 0, False)]
best = None
best_score = 0
while frontier:
current, startidx, cols_done = frontier.pop()
score = matrix_sum(current)
if score > best_score or not best:
best = current
best_score = score
w, h = matrix_size(current)
if not cols_done:
for x in range(startidx, w):
frontier.append((delete_column(current, x), x, False))
startidx = 0
for y in range(startidx, h):
frontier.append((delete_row(current, y), y, True))
return best_score, best
And here's the output on 280Z28's example matrix:
>>> m = ((1, 1, 3), (1, -89, 101), (1, 102, -99))
>>> maximize_sum(m)
(106, [(1, 3), (1, 101)])
Since nobody asked for an efficient algorithm, use brute force: generate every possible matrix that can be created by removing rows and/or columns from the original matrix, choose the best one. A slightly more efficent version, which most likely can be proved to still be correct, is to generate only those variants where the removed rows and columns contain at least one negative value.
To try it in a simple way:
We need the valid subset of the set of entries {A00, A01, A02, ..., A0n, A10, ...,Ann} which max. sum.
First compute all subsets (the power set).
A valid subset is a member of the power set that for each two contained entries Aij and A(i+x)(j+y), contains also the elements A(i+x)j and Ai(j+y) (which are the remaining corners of the rectangle spanned by Aij and A(i+x)(j+y)).
Aij ...
. .
. .
... A(i+x)(j+y)
By that you can eliminate the invalid ones from the power set and find the one with the biggest sum in the remaining.
I'm sure it can be improved by improving an algorithm for power set generation in order to generate only valid subsets and by that avoiding step 2 (adjusting the power set).
I think there are some angles of attack that might improve upon brute force.
memoization, since there are many distinct sequences of edits that will arrive at the same submatrix.
dynamic programming. Because the search space of matrices is highly redundant, my intuition is that there would be a DP formulation that can save a lot of repeated work
I think there's a heuristic approach, but I can't quite nail it down:
if there's one negative number, you can either take the matrix as it is, remove the column of the negative number, or remove its row; I don't think any other "moves" result in a higher sum. For two negative numbers, your options are: remove neither, remove one, remove the other, or remove both (where the act of removal is either by axing the row or the column).
Now suppose the matrix has only one positive number and the rest are all <=0. You clearly want to remove everything but the positive entry. For a matrix with only 2 positive entries and the rest <= 0, the options are: do nothing, whittle down to one, whittle down to the other, or whittle down to both (resulting in a 1x2, 2x1, or 2x2 matrix).
In general this last option falls apart (imagine a matrix with 50 positives & 50 negatives), but depending on your data (few negatives or few positives) it could provide a shortcut.
Create an n-by-1 vector RowSums, and an n-by-1 vector ColumnSums. Initialize them to the row and column sums of the original matrix. O(n²)
If any row or column has a negative sum, remove edit: the one with the minimum such and update the sums in the other direction to reflect their new values. O(n)
Stop when no row or column has a sum less than zero.
This is an iterative variation improving on another answer. It operates in O(n²) time, but fails for some cases mentioned in other answers, which is the complexity limit for this problem (there are n² entries in the matrix, and to even find the minimum you have to examine each cell once).
Edit: The following matrix has no negative rows or columns, but is also not maximized, and my algorithm doesn't catch it.
1 1 3 goal 1 3
1 -89 101 ===> 1 101
1 102 -99
The following matrix does have negative rows and columns, but my algorithm selects the wrong ones for removal.
-5 1 -5 goal 1
1 1 1 ===> 1
-10 2 -10 2
mine
===> 1 1 1
Compute the sum of each row and column. This can be done in O(m) (where m = n^2)
While there are rows or columns that sum to negative remove the row or column that has the lowest sum that is less than zero. Then recompute the sum of each row/column.
The general idea is that as long as there is a row or a column that sums to nevative, removing it will result in a greater overall value. You need to remove them one at a time and recompute because in removing that one row/column you are affecting the sums of the other rows/columns and they may or may not have negative sums any more.
This will produce an optimally maximum result. Runtime is O(mn) or O(n^3)
I cannot really produce an algorithm on top of my head, but to me it 'smells' like dynamic programming, if it serves as a start point.
Big Edit: I honestly don't think there's a way to assess a matrix and determine it is maximized, unless it is completely positive.
Maybe it needs to branch, and fathom all elimination paths. You never no when a costly elimination will enable a number of better eliminations later. We can short circuit if it's found the theoretical maximum, but other than any algorithm would have to be able to step forward and back. I've adapted my original solution to achieve this behaviour with recursion.
Double Secret Edit: It would also make great strides to reduce to complexity if each iteration didn't need to find all negative elements. Considering that they don't change much between calls, it makes more sense to just pass their positions to the next iteration.
Takes a matrix, the list of current negative elements in the matrix, and the theoretical maximum of the initial matrix. Returns the matrix's maximum sum and the list of moves required to get there. In my mind move list contains a list of moves denoting the row/column removed from the result of the previous operation.
Ie: r1,r1
Would translate
-1 1 0 1 1 1
-4 1 -4 5 7 1
1 2 4 ===>
5 7 1
Return if sum of matrix is the theoretical maximum
Find the positions of all negative elements unless an empty set was passed in.
Compute sum of matrix and store it along side an empty move list.
For negative each element:
Calculate the sum of that element's row and column.
clone the matrix and eliminate which ever collection has the minimum sum (row/column) from that clone, note that action as a move list.
clone the list of negative elements and remove any that are effected by the action taken in the previous step.
Recursively call this algorithm providing the cloned matrix, the updated negative element list and the theoretical maximum. Append the moves list returned to the move list for the action that produced the matrix passed to the recursive call.
If the returned value of the recursive call is greater than the stored sum, replace it and store the returned move list.
Return the stored sum and move list.
I'm not sure if it's better or worse than the brute force method, but it handles all the test cases now. Even those where the maximum contains negative values.
This is an optimization problem and can be solved approximately by an iterative algorithm based on simulated annealing:
Notation: C is number of columns.
For J iterations:
Look at each column and compute the absolute benefit of toggling it (turn it off if it's currently on or turn it on if it's currently off). That gives you C values, e.g. -3, 1, 4. A greedy deterministic solution would just pick the last action (toggle the last column to get a benefit of 4) because it locally improves the objective. But that might lock us into a local optimum. Instead, we probabilistically pick one of the three actions, with probabilities proportional to the benefits. To do this, transform them into a probability distribution by putting them through a Sigmoid function and normalizing. (Or use exp() instead of sigmoid()?) So for -3, 1, 4 you get 0.05, 0.73, 0.98 from the sigmoid and 0.03, 0.42, 0.56 after normalizing. Now pick the action according to the probability distribution, e.g. toggle the last column with probability 0.56, toggle the second column with probability 0.42, or toggle the first column with the tiny probability 0.03.
Do the same procedure for the rows, resulting in toggling one of the rows.
Iterate for J iterations until convergence.
We may also, in early iterations, make each of these probability distributions more uniform, so that we don't get locked into bad decisions early on. So we'd raise the unnormalized probabilities to a power 1/T, where T is high in early iterations and is slowly decreased until it approaches 0. For example, 0.05, 0.73, 0.98 from above, raised to 1/10 results in 0.74, 0.97, 1.0, which after normalization is 0.27, 0.36, 0.37 (so it's much more uniform than the original 0.05, 0.73, 0.98).
It's clearly NP-Complete (as outlined above). Given this, if I had to propose the best algorithm I could for the problem:
Try some iterations of quadratic integer programming, formulating the problem as: SUM_ij a_ij x_i y_j, with the x_i and y_j variables constrained to be either 0 or 1. For some matrices I think this will find a solution quickly, for the hardest cases it would be no better than brute force (and not much would be).
In parallel (and using most of the CPU), use a approximate search algorithm to generate increasingly better solutions. Simulating Annealing was suggested in another answer, but having done research on similar combinatorial optimisation problems, my experience is that tabu search would find good solutions faster. This is probably close to optimal in terms of wandering between distinct "potentially better" solutions in the shortest time, if you use the trick of incrementally updating the costs of single changes (see my paper "Graph domination, tabu search and the football pool problem").
Use the best solution so far from the second above to steer the first by avoiding searching possibilities that have lower bounds worse than it.
Obviously this isn't guaranteed to find the maximal solution. But, it generally would when this is feasible, and it would provide a very good locally maximal solution otherwise. If someone had a practical situation requiring such optimisation, this is the solution that I'd think would work best.
Stopping at identifying that a problem is likely to be NP-Complete will not look good in a job interview! (Unless the job is in complexity theory, but even then I wouldn't.) You need to suggest good approaches - that is the point of a question like this. To see what you can come up with under pressure, because the real world often requires tackling such things.
yes, it's NP-complete problem.
It's hard to easily find the best sub-matrix,but we can easily to find some better sub-matrix.
Assume that we give m random points in the matrix as "feeds". then let them to automatically extend by the rules like :
if add one new row or column to the feed-matrix, ensure that the sum will be incrementive.
,then we can compare m sub-matrix to find the best one.
Let's say n = 10.
Brute force (all possible sets of rows x all possible sets of columns) takes
2^10 * 2^10 =~ 1,000,000 nodes.
My first approach was to consider this a tree search, and use
the sum of positive entries is an upper bound for every node in the subtree
as a pruning method. Combined with a greedy algorithm to cheaply generate good initial bounds, this yielded answers in about 80,000 nodes on average.
but there is a better way ! i later realised that
Fix some choice of rows X.
Working out the optimal columns for this set of rows is now trivial (keep a column if its sum of its entries in the rows X is positive, otherwise discard it).
So we can just brute force over all possible choices of rows; this takes 2^10 = 1024 nodes.
Adding the pruning method brought this down to 600 nodes on average.
Keeping 'column-sums' and incrementally updating them when traversing the tree of row-sets should allow the calculations (sum of matrix etc) at each node to be O(n) instead of O(n^2). Giving a total complexity of O(n * 2^n)
For slightly less than optimal solution, I think this is a PTIME, PSPACE complexity issue.
The GREEDY algorithm could run as follows:
Load the matrix into memory and compute row totals. After that run the main loop,
1) Delete the smallest row,
2) Subtract the newly omitted values from the old row totals
--> Break when there are no more negative rows.
Point two is a subtle detail: subtracted two rows/columns has time complexity n.
While re-summing all but two columns has n^2 time complexity!
Take each row and each column and compute the sum. For a 2x2 matrix this will be:
2 1
3 -10
Row(0) = 3
Row(1) = -7
Col(0) = 5
Col(1) = -9
Compose a new matrix
Cost to take row Cost to take column
3 5
-7 -9
Take out whatever you need to, then start again.
You just look for negative values on the new matrix. Those are values that actually substract from the overall matrix value. It terminates when there're no more negative "SUMS" values to take out (therefore all columns and rows SUM something to the final result)
In an nxn matrix that would be O(n^2)Log(n) I think
function pruneMatrix(matrix) {
max = -inf;
bestRowBitField = null;
bestColBitField = null;
for(rowBitField=0; rowBitField<2^matrix.height; rowBitField++) {
for (colBitField=0; colBitField<2^matrix.width; colBitField++) {
sum = calcSum(matrix, rowBitField, colBitField);
if (sum > max) {
max = sum;
bestRowBitField = rowBitField;
bestColBitField = colBitField;
}
}
}
return removeFieldsFromMatrix(bestRowBitField, bestColBitField);
}
function calcSumForCombination(matrix, rowBitField, colBitField) {
sum = 0;
for(i=0; i<matrix.height; i++) {
for(j=0; j<matrix.width; j++) {
if (rowBitField & 1<<i && colBitField & 1<<j) {
sum += matrix[i][j];
}
}
}
return sum;
}