Related papers: Quicksort Is Optimal For Many Equal Keys
We show that several versions of Floyd and Rivest's algorithm Select [Comm.\ ACM {\bf 18} (1975) 173] for finding the $k$th smallest of $n$ elements require at most $n+\min\{k,n-k\}+o(n)$ comparisons on average, even when equal elements…
We show that several versions of Floyd and Rivest's improved algorithm Select for finding the $k$th smallest of $n$ elements require at most $n+\min\{k,n-k\}+O(n^{1/2}\ln^{1/2}n)$ comparisons on average and with high probability. This…
Since the work of Kaligosi and Sanders (2006), it is well-known that Quicksort -- which is commonly considered as one of the fastest in-place sorting algorithms -- suffers in an essential way from branch mispredictions. We present a novel…
We address the problem of learning a ranking by using adaptively chosen pairwise comparisons. Our goal is to recover the ranking accurately but to sample the comparisons sparingly. If all comparison outcomes are consistent with the ranking,…
We consider the problem of sorting $n$ items, given the outcomes of $m$ pre-existing comparisons. We present a simple and natural deterministic algorithm that runs in $O(m + \log T)$ time and does $O(\log T)$ comparisons, where $T$ is the…
The new dual-pivot Quicksort by Vladimir Yaroslavskiy - used in Oracle's Java runtime library since version 7 - features intriguing asymmetries. They make a basic variant of this algorithm use less comparisons than classic single-pivot…
We present an average case analysis of two variants of dual-pivot quicksort, one with a non-algorithmic comparison-optimal partitioning strategy, the other with a closely related algorithmic strategy. For both we calculate the expected…
Given $n$ elements, an integer $k$ and a parameter $\varepsilon$, we study to select an element with rank in $(k-n\varepsilon,k+n\varepsilon]$ using unreliable comparisons where the outcome of each comparison is incorrect independently with…
We consider the classical $k$-means clustering problem in the setting bi-criteria approximation, in which an algoithm is allowed to output $\beta k > k$ clusters, and must produce a clustering with cost at most $\alpha$ times the to the…
Stochastic approximation is a foundation for many algorithms found in machine learning and optimization. It is in general slow to converge: the mean square error vanishes as $O(n^{-1})$. A deterministic counterpart known as quasi-stochastic…
Much of the copious literature on the subject of sorting has concentrated on minimizing the number of comparisons and/or exchanges/copies. However, a more appropriate yardstick for the performance of sorting algorithms is based on the total…
Clustering is a fundamental problem in unsupervised learning, and has been studied widely both as a problem of learning mixture models and as an optimization problem. In this paper, we study clustering with respect the emph{k-median}…
We provide a probabilistic analysis of the output of Quicksort when comparisons can err.
We prove that, for any finite set $A \subset \mathbb Q$ with $|AA| \leq K|A|$ and any positive integer $k$, the $k$-fold product set of the shift $A+1$ satisfies the bound $$| \{(a_1+1)(a_2+1) \cdots (a_k+1) : a_i \in A \}| \geq…
We prove that, for every $0 \leq t \leq 1$, the limiting distribution of the scale-normalized number of key comparisons used by the celebrated algorithm QuickQuant to find the $t$th quantile in a randomly ordered list has a Lipschitz…
We consider the sorted top-$k$ problem whose goal is to recover the top-$k$ items with the correct order out of $n$ items using pairwise comparisons. In many applications, multiple rounds of interaction can be costly. We restrict our…
We study the active learning problem of top-$k$ ranking from multi-wise comparisons under the popular multinomial logit model. Our goal is to identify the top-$k$ items with high probability by adaptively querying sets for comparisons and…
We prove that the Sinkhorn algorithm converges at a rate of $O(k^{-1} \log k)$ in $\ell_1$-norm marginal error, in the asymptotically scalable case. This almost closes the gap between the lower bound $\Omega(k^{-1})$ (Qu et al., 2025) and…
The new dual-pivot Quicksort by Vladimir Yaroslavskiy - used in Oracle's Java runtime library since version 7 - features intriguing asymmetries in its behavior. They were shown to cause a basic variant of this algorithm to use less…
Recently, a new Quicksort variant due to Yaroslavskiy was chosen as standard sorting method for Oracle's Java 7 runtime library. The decision for the change was based on empirical studies showing that on average, the new algorithm is faster…