Introduction to Top K Elements
Explore the top K elements pattern to efficiently find specific subsets from unsorted data using heaps. Understand the use of min and max heaps to maintain largest or smallest elements, reduce time complexity, and apply this technique in real-world problems like driver location services or social media trend analysis.
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 ...