[leetcode]239. Sliding Window Maximum

题目链接：https://leetcode.com/problems/sliding-window-maximum/#/description

 

Given an array nums, there is a sliding window of size k which is moving from the very left of the array to the very right. You can only see the k numbers in the window. Each time the sliding window moves right by one position.

For example,
Given nums = [1,3,-1,-3,5,3,6,7], and k = 3.

Window position                Max
---------------               -----
[1  3  -1] -3  5  3  6  7       3
 1 [3  -1  -3] 5  3  6  7       3
 1  3 [-1  -3  5] 3  6  7       5
 1  3  -1 [-3  5  3] 6  7       5
 1  3  -1  -3 [5  3  6] 7       6
 1  3  -1  -3  5 [3  6  7]      7

Therefore, return the max sliding window as [3,3,5,5,6,7].

The basic idea is to use a deque (buffer) to save all currently potential "maximum" elements (i.e. the element in the current k-element window [i-k+1, i], and it is larger than the elements after itself). So for each i, we first pop up the elements that are no larger than nums[i] from buffer until we find one that is larger than nums[i] or the buffer is empty since those elements will be covered by nums[i] and can not be a maximum of any k-element window. Then we put nums[i] in the buffer. If i>=k-1, we need to ouput the maximum for window [i-k+1, i], which is the front element of buffer. At last, we will check if the front element is nums[i-k+1], if so, we have to pop it up since it will be out of the window [i-k+2, i+1] in the next iteration. Since all the elements will be pushed into/ popped out of the buffer only once, so the time complexity is O(N).

 

class Solution {
public:
    vector<int> maxSlidingWindow(vector<int>& nums, int k) {
        deque<int> buffer;
        vector<int> res;

        for(auto i=0; i<nums.size();++i)
        {
            while(!buffer.empty() && nums[i]>=nums[buffer.back()]) buffer.pop_back();
            buffer.push_back(i);

            if(i>=k-1) res.push_back(nums[buffer.front()]);
            if(buffer.front()== i-k + 1) buffer.pop_front();
        }
        return res;
    }
};