Sorting is one of the oldest computing problems and is still very important in the age of big data. Various algorithms and implementation techniques have been proposed. In this study, we focus on comparison based, internal sorting algorithms. We created 12 data types of various sizes for experiments and tested extensively various implementations in a single setting. Using some effective techniques, we discovered that quicksort is adaptive to nearly sorted inputs and is still the best overall sorting algorithm. We also identified which techniques are effective in timsort, one of the most popular and efficient sorting method based on natural mergesort, and created our version of mergesort, which runs faster than timsort on nearly sorted instances. Our implementations of quicksort and mergesort are different from other implementations reported in all textbooks or research articles, faster than any version of the C library qsort functions, not only for randomly generated data, but also for various types of nearly sorted data. This experiment can help the user to choose the best sorting algorithm for the hard sorting job at hand. This work provides a platform for anyone to test their own sorting algorithm against the best in the field.
This short article presents a new implementation for decision trees. By introducing pre-sorted deques, the leaf-wise greedy tree growing strategy no longer needs to re-sort data at each node, and takes O(kn) time and O(1) extra memory locating the best split and branching. The consistent, superior performance - plus its simplicity and guarantee in producing the same classification results as the standard decision trees - makes the new implementation a drop-in replacement for depth-wise tree induction with strong performance.
We use soft heaps to obtain simpler optimal algorithms for selecting the $k$-th smallest item, and the set of~$k$ smallest items, from a heap-ordered tree, from a collection of sorted lists, and from $X+Y$, where $X$ and $Y$ are two unsorted sets. Our results match, and in some ways extend and improve, classical results of Frederickson (1993) and Frederickson and Johnson (1982). In particular, for selecting the $k$-th smallest item, or the set of~$k$ smallest items, from a collection of~$m$ sorted lists we obtain a new optimal "output-sensitive" algorithm that performs only $O(m+\sum_{i=1}^m \…
We present an $O(n\sqrt{\log n})$ time and linear space algorithm for sorting real numbers. This breaks the long time illusion that real numbers have to be sorted by comparison sorting and take $Ω(n\log n)$ time to be sorted.
The original Leapfrogging Samplesort operates on a sorted sample of size $s$ and an unsorted part of size $s+1$. We generalize this to a sorted sample of size $s$ and an unsorted part of size $(2^k-1)(s+1)$, where $k = O(1)$. We present a practical implementation of this class of algorithms and we show that the worst-case complexity is $O(n \log^2 n)$ and the average-case complexity is $O(n \log n)$. Keywords: Samplesort, Quicksort, Leapfrogging Samplesort, sorting, analysis of algorithms.
Sorted Table Search Procedures are the quintessential query-answering tool, with widespread usage that now includes also Web Applications, e.g, Search Engines (Google Chrome) and ad Bidding Systems (AppNexus). Speeding them up, at very little cost in space, is still a quite significant achievement. Here we study to what extend Machine Learning Techniques can contribute to obtain such a speed-up via a systematic experimental comparison of known efficient implementations of Sorted Table Search procedures, with different Data Layouts, and their Learned counterparts developed here. We characterize…
Applications often require a fast, single-threaded search algorithm over sorted data, typical in table-lookup operations. We explore various search algorithms for a large number of search candidates over a relatively small array of logarithmically-distributed sorted data. These include an innovative hash-based search that takes advantage of floating point representation to bin data by the exponent. Algorithms that can be optimized to take advantage of SIMD vector instructions are of particular interest. We then conduct a case study applying our results and analyzing algorithmic performance wit…
We empirically study sorting in the evolving data model. In this model, a sorting algorithm maintains an approximation to the sorted order of a list of data items while simultaneously, with each comparison made by the algorithm, an adversary randomly swaps the order of adjacent items in the true sorted order. Previous work studies only two versions of quicksort, and has a gap between the lower bound of Omega(n) and the best upper bound of O(n log log n). The experiments we perform in this paper provide empirical evidence that some quadratic-time algorithms such as insertion sort and bubble sor…
Łukasiewicz Research Network（卢卡西维茨研究网络）；Industrial Research Institute for Automation and Measurements（工业自动化与测量研究所）；PIAP（工业自动化与测量研究所）
This paper introduces new algorithm for line extraction from laser range data including methodology for efficient computation. The task is cast to series of one dimensional problems in various spaces. A fast and simple specialization of DBSCAN algorithm is proposed to solve one dimensional subproblems. Experiments suggest that the method is suitable for real-time applications, handles noise well and may be useful in practice.
Images sorted by similarity enables more images to be viewed simultaneously, and can be very useful for stock photo agencies or e-commerce applications. Visually sorted grid layouts attempt to arrange images so that their proximity on the grid corresponds as closely as possible to their similarity. Various metrics exist for evaluating such arrangements, but there is low experimental evidence on correlation between human perceived quality and metric value. We propose Distance Preservation Quality (DPQ) as a new metric to evaluate the quality of an arrangement. Extensive user testing revealed st…
The approximate sorting for big data is considered in this paper. The goal of approximate sorting for big data is to generate an approximate sorted result, but using less CPU and I/O cost. For big data, we consider the approximate sorting in I/O model. The existing metrics on permutation space are not available for external approximate sorting algorithms. Thus, we propose a new kind of metric named External metric, which ignores the errors and dislocation that happened in each I/O block.The External Spearmans footrule metric is an example of external metric for Spearmans footrule metric. Furth…
Learned Indexes are a novel approach to search in a sorted table. A model is used to predict an interval in which to search into and a Binary Search routine is used to finalize the search. They are quite effective. For the final stage, usually, the lower_bound routine of the Standard C++ library is used, although this is more of a natural choice rather than a requirement. However, recent studies, that do not use Machine Learning predictions, indicate that other implementations of Binary Search or variants, namely k-ary Search, are better suited to take advantage of the features offered by mode…
