Introduction to Top K Elements
Explore the top K elements pattern to efficiently identify largest or smallest subsets within unsorted data using min or max heaps. Understand how heaps maintain these elements with lower time complexity and apply this pattern to real-world problems like ride-sharing and social media trend analysis.
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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 time. However, the top k elements pattern bypasses the need for full sorting, reducing the time complexity to by managing which elements we compare and keep track of.
Which data structure can we use to solve such problems? A heap is the best data structure to keep track of the smallest or largest ...