Introduction to Top K Elements
Explore the top k elements pattern to efficiently extract a specific subset from unsorted data. Understand how heaps enable finding largest or smallest elements with reduced time complexity. This lesson helps you identify when to apply this pattern and solve real-world problems like ride-sharing driver location and social media trends by utilizing min and max heaps.
We'll cover the following...
About the pattern
The top k elements pattern is an important technique in coding that helps us efficiently find a specific number of elements, known as , from a set of data. This is particularly useful when we’re tasked with identifying the largest, smallest, or most/least frequent elements within an unsorted collection.
To solve tasks like these, one might think to sort the entire collection first, which takes time, and then select the top k elements, taking additional ...