What data structure to use - java

I'm looking for a data structure that has the following properties.
Stores a list of tuple<Double,Integer,Integer>. Order is only on double. Two tuples with the same double value are consider the same.
Supports duplicates.
Needs to be able to traverse in ascending order. If there are duplicates, the one added later should have higher order.
Find/Insert fast
Remove fast, note that remove always follows this pattern
Method contains remove:
for(int i=list.size()-1;i>=0;i--){// assume list is in ascending order
if(list[j:i] can be merged){
remove list[j:i-1];
update list[i]'s two integers;
i = j-1;
}
}
I currently use ArrayList and keep it sorted. Finding is fast with binary search. However insertion and deletion will involve lots of copy in memory, e.g. insertion in the front of the list shifts all the elements.

One solution would be to have a sorted map to lists of tuples:
SortedMap<Double,List<Tuple<Integer,Integer>>>
The declaration line is bit ugly, but it will work. I've used maps to lists many times before. The nice thing about it is that you can then delete items from the lists and as long as your lists are each short, you have a smaller number of moves. To iterate over the entire structure, you'd need to create your own iterator, or adapt your original code.

If you decide to write your own Double comparator there are a few things to be aware of.
The first is that floating point equality is a very tricky area. By default Java does not ensure consisten floating point math when your code is running in different virtual machines although this can be done by using the strictfp keyword. This inconsistency in floating point arithmetic can cause issues in applications that are unaware of this and run on multiple virtual machines communicating with one another, such as servers and client communication.
The second tricky bit is that Comparators operate on Objects which means you will be working with Doubles not doubles. The following four operations cause Double to be unboxed into double: <, <=, >, and >=. The following two do not cause unboxing: == and !=. These two operators perform Object memory pointer comparisons. Bottom line, manually unbox the Doubles into doubles before performing comparisons; it will greatly reduce bugs.

Related

Is it possible to add/update a sorted list in constant time?

Suppose you are given a list of integers that have already been sorted such as (1,7,13,14,50). It should be noted that the list will contain no duplicates.
Is there some data structure that could store this while allowing me to add any new element (at it's proper location) in constant time? add(10) would yield (1,7,10,13,14,50).
Similarly, would I be able to update an element (such as changing 7 to 19) and shift the order accordingly in constant time? change(7,19) yields (1,13,14,19,50).
For a class I need to write a data structure that performs these operations as quickly as possible, but I just wanted to know if constant time could be done and if not, then what would the ideal runtime be?
To insert in constant time, O(1), this would only occur as a best case for any of the data structures. Hash tables generally have the best insertion time, but it might not always be O(1) if there are collisions and there is separate chaining. You do not sort a hash so the complexity is irrelevent.
Binary tree's have a good insertion time, and as a bonus, it is sorted already upon inserting a new node. This takes on average O(logn) time however. The best case for inserting is O(1) if the tree is empty.
Those were just a couple examples, see here for more info on the complexities of these operations: http://bigocheatsheet.com/
In general? No. Determining where to insert a new element or re-ordering the list after insertion involves performing analysis of the list's contents, which involves reading the elements of the list, which (in general) means iterating over some portion of the length of the list. This (again, in general) is dependant on how many elements are in the list, which by definition is not a constant. Hence, a constant-time sorted insert is simply not possible except in special cases.
A binary tree, TreeSet, would be adequate. An array with Arrays.binarySearch and Arrays.copy would be fine too because here we have ints, and then we do not need the wrapper class Integer.
For real constant time, O(1), one must pay in space. Use a BitSet. To add 17 simply set 17 to true. There are optimized methods to find the next set bit and so on.
But I doubt optimizing is really needed at this spot. File I/O might pay off more.

Fastest way to add a value in the middle of a sorted array - Java

I have a sorted array, lets say D={1,2,3,4,5,6} and I want to add the number 5 in the middle. I can do that by adding the value 5 in the middle and move the other values one step to the right.
The problem is that I have an array with 1000 length and I need to do that operation 10.000 times, so I need a faster way.
What options do I have? Can I use LinkedLists for better performance?
That depends on how you add said numbers. If only in ascending or descending order - then yes, LinkedList will do the trick, but only if you keep the node reference in between inserts.
If you're adding numbers in arbitrary order, you may want to deconstruct your array, add the new entries and reconstruct it again. This way you can use a data structure that's good at adding and removing entries while maintaining "sortedness". You have to relax one of your assumptions however.
Option 1
Assuming you don't need constant time random access while adding numbers:
Use a binary sorted tree.
The downside - while you're adding, you cannot read or reference an element by their position, not easily at least. Best case scenario - you're using a tree that keeps track of how many elements the left node has and can get the ith element in log(n) time. You can still get pretty good performance if you're just iterating through the elements though.
Total runtime is down to n * log(n) from n^2. Random access is log(n).
Option 2
Assuming you don't need the elements sorted while you're adding them.
Use a normal array, but add elements to the end of it, then sort it all when you're done.
Total runtime: n * log(n). Random access is O(1), however elements are not sorted.
Option 3
(This is kinda cheating, but...)
If you have a limited number of values, then employing the idea of BucketSort will help you achieve great performance. Essentially - you would replace your array with a sorted map.
Runtime is O(n), random access is O(1), but it's only applicable to a very small number of situations.
TL;DR
Getting arbitrary values, quick adding and constant-time positional access, while maintaining sortedness is difficult. I don't know any such structure. You have to relax some assumption to have room for optimizations.
A LinkedList will probably not help you very much, if at all. Basically you are exchanging the cost of shifting every value on insert with the cost of having to traverse each node in order to reach the insertion point.
This traversal cost will also need to be paid whenever accessing each node. A LinkedList shines as a queue, but if you need to access the internal nodes individually it's not a great choice.
In your case, you want a sorted Tree of some sort. A BST (Balanced Search Tree, also referred to as a Sorted Binary Tree) is one of the simplest types and is probably a good place to start.
A good option is a TreeSet, which is likely functionally equivalent to how you were using an array, if you simply need to keep track of a set of sorted numbers.

Fast data structure for random and sequential access

I'm looking for a data structure or a combination of various data structures that perform very well on random and sequential access.
I need to map an (integer) id to a (double) value and sort by that value. The values can occur multiple times.
The amount of data can possibly be large.
Insertion or deletion are not critical. Iteration and Get Operations are.
I'm using Java. Currently I have a Guava Multimap, built from a TreeMap and ArrayList for sequential access. For random access I use a HashMap in parallel.
Any suggestions?
When insertion and deletion are not critical, then a sorted array might be your friend. You could search there directly via Arrays.binarySearch and you custom Comparator.
In case you don't know any sane upper bound on the size, you can switch to an ArrayList (or implement you own resizing, but why...).
I guess this could be faster then the TreeMap, which is good when insertion and/or deletion are important, but suffers from bad spatial locality (binary tree with many pointers to follow).
The optimal structure would place all the data in a single array, which is impossible in Java (you'd need C struct for this). You could fake it by placing doubles into longs, this is sure to work and to be fast (Double.doubleToLongBits and back are intrinsics, and the length of both datatypes is 64 bits). This would mean a non-trivial amount of work, especially for sorting (if this is uncommon enough, a conversion in some sortable array and back would do).
In order to get faster search, you could use hashing, e.g., via a HashMap pointing to first element and linking the elements. As you keys are ints, some primitive-capable implementation would help (e.g. trove or fastutils or whatever).
There are countless possibilities, but keeping all your data in sync can be hard.

Collection to store primitive ints that allows for faster contains() & ordered iteration

I need a space efficient collection to store a large list of primitive int(s)(with around 800,000 ints), that allows for fast operations for contains() & allows for iteration in a defined order.
Faster contains() operations to check whether an int is there in the list or not, is main priority as that is done very frequently.
I'm open to using widely used & popular 3rd party libraries like Trove, Guava & such others.
I have looked at TIntSet from Trove but I believe that would not let me define the order of iteration anyhow.
Edit:
The size of collection would be around 800,000 ints.
The range of values in the collection will be from 0 to Integer.Max_VALUE. The order of iteration should be actually based on the order in which I add the value to collection or may be I just provide an ordered int[] & it should iterate in the same order.
As data structure I would choose an array of longs (which I logically treat as two ints). The high-int part (bits 63 - 32) represent the int value you add to the collection. The low-int part (bits 31 - 0) represents the index of the successor when iterating. In case of your 800.000 unique integers you need to create a long array of size 800.000.
Now you organize the array as a binary balanced tree ordered by your values. To the left the smaller values and to the right the higher values. You need two more tracking values: one int to point to the first index to start iterating at and one int to point to the index of the value inserted last.
Whenever you add a new value, reorganize your binary balanced tree and update the pointer from the last value added pointing to the currently added value (as indexes).
Wrap this values (the array and both int values) as the collection of your choice.
With this data structure you get a search performance of O(log(n)) and a memory usage of two times the size of values.
As this reeks of database, but you require a more direct approach, use a memory mapped file of java.nio. Especially a self-defined ordering of 800_000 ints will not do otherwise. The contains could be realized with a BitSet in memory though, parallel to the ordering in the file.
You can use 2 Sets one set is set based on hash (e.g. TIntSet) for fast contains operations. Another is set based on tree structure like TreeSet to iterate in speicific order.
And when you need to add int, you update both sets at the same time.
It sounds like LinkedHashSet might be what you're looking for. Internally, it maintains two structures--a HashSet and a LinkedList, allowing for both fast 'contains()' (from the former) and defined iteration order (from the latter).
Just use a ArrayList<Integer>.

What data-structure should I use to create my own "BigInteger" class?

As an optional assignment, I'm thinking about writing my own implementation of the BigInteger class, where I will provide my own methods for addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc.
This will be for arbitrarily long integer numbers, even hundreds of digits long.
While doing the math on these numbers, digit by digit isn't hard, what do you think the best datastructure would be to represent my "BigInteger"?
At first I was considering using an Array but then I was thinking I could still potentially overflow (run out of array slots) after a large add or multiplication. Would this be a good case to use a linked list, since I can tack on digits with O(1) time complexity?
Is there some other data-structure that would be even better suited than a linked list? Should the type that my data-structure holds be the smallest possible integer type I have available to me?
Also, should I be careful about how I store my "carry" variable? Should it, itself, be of my "BigInteger" type?
Check out the book C Interfaces and Implementations by David R. Hanson. It has 2 chapters on the subject, covering the vector structure, word size and many other issues you are likely to encounter.
It's written for C, but most of it is applicable to C++ and/or Java. And if you use C++ it will be a bit simpler because you can use something like std::vector to manage the array allocation for you.
Always use the smallest int type that will do the job you need (bytes). A linked list should work well, since you won't have to worry about overflowing.
If you use binary trees (whose leaves are ints), you get all the advantages of the linked list (unbounded number of digits, etc) with simpler divide-and-conquer algorithms. You do not have in this case a single base but many depending the level at which you're working.
If you do this, you need to use a BigInteger for the carry. You may consider it an advantage of the "linked list of ints" approach that the carry can always be represented as an int (and this is true for any base, not just for base 10 as most answers seem to assume that you should use... In any base, the carry is always a single digit)
I might as well say it: it would be a terrible waste to use base 10 when you can use 2^30 or 2^31.
Accessing elements of linked lists is slow. I think arrays are the way to go, with lots of bound checking and run time array resizing as needed.
Clarification: Traversing a linked list and traversing an array are both O(n) operations. But traversing a linked list requires deferencing a pointer at each step. Just because two algorithms both have the same complexity it doesn't mean that they both take the same time to run. The overhead of allocating and deallocating n nodes in a linked list will also be much heavier than memory management of a single array of size n, even if the array has to be resized a few times.
Wow, there are some… interesting answers here. I'd recommend reading a book rather than try to sort through all this contradictory advice.
That said, C/C++ is also ill-suited to this task. Big-integer is a kind of extended-precision math. Most CPUs provide instructions to handle extended-precision math at comparable or same speed (bits per instruction) as normal math. When you add 2^32+2^32, the answer is 0… but there is also a special carry output from the processor's ALU which a program can read and use.
C++ cannot access that flag, and there's no way in C either. You have to use assembler.
Just to satisfy curiosity, you can use the standard Boolean arithmetic to recover carry bits etc. But you will be much better off downloading an existing library.
I would say an array of ints.
An Array is indeed a natural fit. I think it is acceptable to throw OverflowException, when you run out of place in your memory. The teacher will see attention to detail.
A multiplication roughly doubles digit numbers, addition increases it by at most 1. It is easy to create a sufficiently big Array to store the result of your operation.
Carry is at most a one-digit long number in multiplication (9*9 = 1, carry 8). A single int will do.
std::vector<bool> or std::vector<unsigned int> is probably what you want. You will have to push_back() or resize() on them as you need more space for multiplies, etc. Also, remember to push_back the correct sign bits if you're using two-compliment.
i would say a std::vector of char (since it has to hold only 0-9) (if you plan to work in BCD)
If not BCD then use vector of int (you didnt make it clear)
Much less space overhead that link list
And all advice says 'use vector unless you have a good reason not too'
As a rule of thumb, use std::vector instead of std::list, unless you need to insert elements in the middle of the sequence very often. Vectors tend to be faster, since they are stored contiguously and thus benefit from better spatial locality (a major performance factor on modern platforms).
Make sure you use elements that are natural for the platform. If you want to be platform independent, use long. Remember that unless you have some special compiler intrinsics available, you'll need a type at least twice as large to perform multiplication.
I don't understand why you'd want carry to be a big integer. Carry is a single bit for addition and element-sized for multiplication.
Make sure you read Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, algorithms pertaining to arbitrary precision arithmetic are described there to a great extent.

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