545 research outputs found
On the tails of the limiting Quicksort distribution
We give asymptotics for the left and right tails of the limiting Quicksort
distribution. The results agree with, but are less precise than, earlier
non-rigorous results by Knessl and Spankowski.Comment: 8 pages. v2: Typos corrected and some formulations improve
Worst-Case Efficient Sorting with QuickMergesort
The two most prominent solutions for the sorting problem are Quicksort and
Mergesort. While Quicksort is very fast on average, Mergesort additionally
gives worst-case guarantees, but needs extra space for a linear number of
elements. Worst-case efficient in-place sorting, however, remains a challenge:
the standard solution, Heapsort, suffers from a bad cache behavior and is also
not overly fast for in-cache instances.
In this work we present median-of-medians QuickMergesort (MoMQuickMergesort),
a new variant of QuickMergesort, which combines Quicksort with Mergesort
allowing the latter to be implemented in place. Our new variant applies the
median-of-medians algorithm for selecting pivots in order to circumvent the
quadratic worst case. Indeed, we show that it uses at most
comparisons for large enough.
We experimentally confirm the theoretical estimates and show that the new
algorithm outperforms Heapsort by far and is only around 10% slower than
Introsort (std::sort implementation of stdlibc++), which has a rather poor
guarantee for the worst case. We also simulate the worst case, which is only
around 10% slower than the average case. In particular, the new algorithm is a
natural candidate to replace Heapsort as a worst-case stopper in Introsort
Analysis of Quickselect under Yaroslavskiy's Dual-Pivoting Algorithm
There is excitement within the algorithms community about a new partitioning
method introduced by Yaroslavskiy. This algorithm renders Quicksort slightly
faster than the case when it runs under classic partitioning methods. We show
that this improved performance in Quicksort is not sustained in Quickselect; a
variant of Quicksort for finding order statistics. We investigate the number of
comparisons made by Quickselect to find a key with a randomly selected rank
under Yaroslavskiy's algorithm. This grand averaging is a smoothing operator
over all individual distributions for specific fixed order statistics. We give
the exact grand average. The grand distribution of the number of comparison
(when suitably scaled) is given as the fixed-point solution of a distributional
equation of a contraction in the Zolotarev metric space. Our investigation
shows that Quickselect under older partitioning methods slightly outperforms
Quickselect under Yaroslavskiy's algorithm, for an order statistic of a random
rank. Similar results are obtained for extremal order statistics, where again
we find the exact average, and the distribution for the number of comparisons
(when suitably scaled). Both limiting distributions are of perpetuities (a sum
of products of independent mixed continuous random variables).Comment: full version with appendices; otherwise identical to Algorithmica
versio
Distributional convergence for the number of symbol comparisons used by QuickSort
Most previous studies of the sorting algorithm QuickSort have used the number
of key comparisons as a measure of the cost of executing the algorithm. Here we
suppose that the n independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) keys are
each represented as a sequence of symbols from a probabilistic source and that
QuickSort operates on individual symbols, and we measure the execution cost as
the number of symbol comparisons. Assuming only a mild "tameness" condition on
the source, we show that there is a limiting distribution for the number of
symbol comparisons after normalization: first centering by the mean and then
dividing by n. Additionally, under a condition that grows more restrictive as p
increases, we have convergence of moments of orders p and smaller. In
particular, we have convergence in distribution and convergence of moments of
every order whenever the source is memoryless, that is, whenever each key is
generated as an infinite string of i.i.d. symbols. This is somewhat surprising;
even for the classical model that each key is an i.i.d. string of unbiased
("fair") bits, the mean exhibits periodic fluctuations of order n.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AAP866 the Annals of
Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
QuickHeapsort: Modifications and improved analysis
We present a new analysis for QuickHeapsort splitting it into the analysis of
the partition-phases and the analysis of the heap-phases. This enables us to
consider samples of non-constant size for the pivot selection and leads to
better theoretical bounds for the algorithm. Furthermore we introduce some
modifications of QuickHeapsort, both in-place and using n extra bits. We show
that on every input the expected number of comparisons is n lg n - 0.03n + o(n)
(in-place) respectively n lg n -0.997 n+ o (n). Both estimates improve the
previously known best results. (It is conjectured in Wegener93 that the
in-place algorithm Bottom-Up-Heapsort uses at most n lg n + 0.4 n on average
and for Weak-Heapsort which uses n extra-bits the average number of comparisons
is at most n lg n -0.42n in EdelkampS02.) Moreover, our non-in-place variant
can even compete with index based Heapsort variants (e.g. Rank-Heapsort in
WangW07) and Relaxed-Weak-Heapsort (n lg n -0.9 n+ o (n) comparisons in the
worst case) for which no O(n)-bound on the number of extra bits is known
Approximating the limiting Quicksort distribution
The limiting distribution of the normalized number of comparisons used by
Quicksort to sort an array of n numbers is known to be the unique fixed point
with zero mean of a certain distributional transformation S. We study the
convergence to the limiting distribution of the sequence of distributions
obtained by iterating the transformation S, beginning with a (nearly) arbitrary
starting distribution. We demonstrate geometrically fast convergence for
various metrics and discuss some implications for numerical calculations of the
limiting Quicksort distribution. Finally, we give companion lower bounds which
show that the convergence is not faster than geometric.Comment: 30 pages. See also http://www.mts.jhu.edu/~fill/ and
http://www.math.uu.se/~svante/ . Submitted for publication in January, 200
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