Introduction to Subsets
Explore how to use the subsets pattern to solve coding problems involving combinations, permutations, and sums. Learn to incrementally build all possible subsets and apply backtracking techniques. This lesson helps you recognize when to use this approach and apply it to practical problems like playlist generation, test case creation, and feature selection in machine learning.
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About the pattern
The subsets pattern is an important strategy to solve coding problems that involve exploring all possible combinations of elements from a given data structure. This pattern can be useful when dealing with sets containing unique elements or arrays/lists that may contain duplicate elements. It is used to generate all specific subsets based on the conditions that the problem provides us.
The common method used is to build the subsets incrementally, including or excluding each element of the original data structure, depending on the constraints of the problem. This process is continued for the remaining elements until all desired subsets have been generated.
Here is the template for generating all subsets, where we incrementally include or exclude each ...