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I took an algorhytm course on coursera and there some optional questions for student enrichment. I can't solve the following task:

Decimal dominants. Given an array with n keys, design an algorithm to find all values that occur more than n/10 times. The expected running time of your algorithm should be linear.

And authors provied following hint:

Hint: determine the (n/10)-th largest key using quickselect and check if it occurs more than n/10 times.

Actually it is not cleat for me how can quick select help me. quick select is algorhitm which can help to find k-th largest element in linear time. In the lecture materials written that it work approximately linear.

Let's work with example. We have 100 elements array. We found 10-th elements. ( frankly speaking according the book we found such element order that all elements with index > 90 more or equals than elems[90] and all elements with index < 90 less or equals elem[90]

  1. How can I calculate occurences?
  2. Imagine, that we calculated occurences and it is less than 10. What would be the next step?

P.S.

http://dl4.joxi.net/drive/2018/12/02/0005/3037/338909/09/d99f2edb52.jpg

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  • $\begingroup$ The hint seems wrong. Can you double check? $\endgroup$
    – John L.
    Dec 2, 2018 at 14:31
  • $\begingroup$ @Apass.Jack, dl4.joxi.net/drive/2018/12/02/0005/3037/338909/09/… $\endgroup$ Dec 2, 2018 at 14:34
  • $\begingroup$ Finally I can see the hint make sense! $\endgroup$
    – John L.
    Dec 3, 2018 at 16:26
  • $\begingroup$ @Apass.Jack, could you elaborate? $\endgroup$ Dec 3, 2018 at 16:50
  • $\begingroup$ Yes, I will. The basic idea is divide and conquer built on top of quickselect. $\endgroup$
    – John L.
    Dec 3, 2018 at 16:54

1 Answer 1

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Perhaps the hint was aiming at the following approach. Suppose that the array were sorted. If a value appears $m$ times and we divide the array into intervals of length $m$, then the value must appear at the end of one of the intervals. This suggests the following algorithm for finding all values that appear $n/C$ times: compute the $i \cdot n/C$-largest elements for $1 \leq i \leq C$, and for each of them, check whether the value appears at least $n/C$ times. Each iteration takes $O(n)$ time using Quickselect, for a total of $O(Cn)$ time.

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