CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sortingquicksort
Henley Wing Chiu
Henley Wing Chiu

Reputation: 22515

Finding the kth smallest item in an array using quicksort => expected running time?

If I am using a modified version of quicksort to find the kth smallest item in an array, why is the expected running time O(n) (as stated by Programming Pearls book)?

The algorithm I'm using does the following:

1) Runs quick sort on the array
2) If k is > the correct location of pivot, then run quicksort on the 2nd half.
Otherwise run it on the first half.

I was under the impression this would take O(n * logn) work.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2569

Answers (2)

Karthikeyan
Karthikeyan

Reputation: 990

This link, may help to understand the proof for randomized quick select, http://pine.cs.yale.edu/pinewiki/QuickSelect,

Idea behind getting Kth order statistic is, select a pivot, and partition the data as suggested by quick sort and find out which partition the element being searched for lies in. Partitioning has the complexity of O(n). After partitioning, you need to pick, just one of resulting partition for further processing unlike quick sort, where you have to process both.

In the below description, I am not trying to prove, but wanted to give intuitive thoughts to understand the expected complexity,

For simplicity, let us assume, on every iteration, pivot splits the array in equal halves, then the complexity is clearly O(n), as 

   n + (n/2) + (n/4) ... <= c.n, O(n)

For intuitive understanding, getting a worst case partitioning, where you would have to process (n-1) elements in every iteration happens with the probability of just (1/n). So, the worst case complexity is anyway, O(n^2).

Anyways, if you want a rigorous proof for expected complexity, you can go through the link, provided.

Upvotes: 4

user207421
user207421

Reputation: 310884

That won't be the algorithm that's described in the book. More likely it does one partition at (1), (2), etc.

Upvotes: 0

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