I am looking for an algorithm that returns the indice of the kth largest element in a array. I found many algoritms but most of them return the list of the k largest elements (Extract K largest elements from array of N integers in O(N + K) time, Best way to retrieve K largest elements from large unsorted arrays?, ...).
In this case, only the indice of the kth largest element is needed. All the kth largest elementS are not needed. As array and k are large, I would like to avoid the allocation of an array (or other structure, e.g. linked list) of dimension k and the initial array must be unchanged. What is (are) the most efficient algorithm(s) ?
Indice of k largest element in a array algorithm
Stef1611
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1 Answers
Finding the k'th largest element in an array cannot be done in less than O(k*n) (or O((n-k)*n)) time without modifying the input array or allocating more than O(1) additional space. If you do not permute the array, you can't do any better than brute force; if you do permute the array, you can't reverse the permutation without keeping extra information around to do it.
(A randomized selection algorithm can achieve linearithmic expected time, but cannot improve on the worst-case time.)
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