indices of the k largest elements in an unsorted length n array

Question

I need to find the indices of the k largest elements of an unsorted, length n, array/vector in C++, with k < n. I have seen how to use nth_element() to find the k-th statistic, but I'm not sure if using this is the right choice for my problem as it seems like I would need to make k calls to nth_statistic, which I guess it would have complexity O(kn), which may be as good as it can get? Or is there a way to do this just in O(n)?

Implementing it without nth_element() seems like I will have to iterate over the whole array once, populating a list of indices of the largest elements at each step.

Is there anything in the standard C++ library that makes this a one-liner or any clever way to implement this myself in just a couple lines? In my particular case, k = 3, and n = 6, so efficiency isn't a huge concern, but it would be nice to find a clean and efficient way to do this for arbitrary k and n.

It looks like Mark the top N elements of an unsorted array is probably the closest posting I can find on SO, the postings there are in Python and PHP.

Answer 1

Here is my implementation that does what I want and I think is reasonably efficient:

#include <queue>
#include <vector>
// maxindices.cc
// compile with:
// g++ -std=c++11 maxindices.cc -o maxindices
int main()
{
  std::vector<double> test = {0.2, 1.0, 0.01, 3.0, 0.002, -1.0, -20};
  std::priority_queue<std::pair<double, int>> q;
  for (int i = 0; i < test.size(); ++i) {
    q.push(std::pair<double, int>(test[i], i));
  }
  int k = 3; // number of indices we need
  for (int i = 0; i < k; ++i) {
    int ki = q.top().second;
    std::cout << "index[" << i << "] = " << ki << std::endl;
    q.pop();
  }
}

which gives output:

index[0] = 3
index[1] = 1
index[2] = 0