• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to secondary sidebar

GoHired

Interview Questions asked in Google, Microsoft, Amazon

Join WeekEnd Online Batch from 4-April-2020 on How to Crack Coding Interview in Just 10 Weeks : Fees just 20,000 INR

  • Home
  • Best Java Books
  • Algorithm
  • Internship
  • Certificates
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Array
  • Stack
  • Queue
  • LinkedList
  • DP
  • Strings
  • Tree
  • Mathametical
  • Puzzles
  • Graph

Find Nearest Minimum number in left side in O(n)

May 15, 2016 by Dhaval Dave

Given an array of integers, find the nearest smaller number for every element such that the smaller element is on left side.

Examples:

Input:  arr[] = {1, 6, 4, 10, 2, 5}
Output:         {-1, 1, 1, 4, 1, 2}
First element ('1') has no element on left side. For 6, 
there is only one smaller element on left side '1'. 
For 10, there are three smaller elements on left side (1,
6 and 4), nearest among the three elements is 4.

Input: arr[] = {1, 3, 0, 2, 5}
Output:        {-1,1,-1, 0, 2}

Expected time complexity is O(n).

As we need to keep minimum value for each element on left side.
We can think like :
1. Left to right iterate,
2. Keep minimum value at each step.
3. Idea is to use Stack ( Refer similar question : Find Minimum Number from Input Elements in O(1) {remember using stack we were achieving this}

The idea is to use a stack. Stack is used to maintain a subsequence of the values that have been processed so far and are smaller than any later value that has already been processed.

Below is stack based algorithm

Let input sequence be 'arr[]' and size of array be 'n'

1) Create a new empty stack S

2) For every element 'arr[i]' in the input sequence 'arr[]',
   where 'i' goes from 0 to n-1.
    a) while S is nonempty and the top element of 
       S is greater than or equal to 'arr[i]':
           pop S
    
    b) if S is empty:
           'arr[i]' has no preceding smaller value
    c) else:
           the nearest smaller value to 'arr[i]' is 
           the top element of S

    d) push 'arr[i]' onto S

We can think to code it like below from above discussed algorithm and steps  for finding nearest minimum number left side in array.

#include 
#include 
using namespace std;
 
void printLeftSmaller(int arr[], int n)
{
    stack S;
    for (int i=0; i<n; i++) { while (!S.empty() && S.top() >= arr[i])
            S.pop();
        if (S.empty())
            cout << "-1, ";
        else  
        //Else print the nearest smaller element
            cout << S.top() << ", ";
        S.push(arr[i]);
    }
}
 
/* Driver program to test insertion sort */
int main()
{
    int arr[] = {1, 3, 0, 2, 5};
    int n = sizeof(arr)/sizeof(arr[0]);
    printLeftSmaller(arr, n);
    return 0;
}

To find Minimum number Left side of array , we can try above mentioned code.
Instead Array , similar approach we can think for Linked Lists as well.

Time Complexity : O(n)
Space Complexity : O(n)

To contribute to Gohired.in please mail to admin@gohired.in, w’ll represent your approach/ solution with your name to enhance your CV

Similar Articles

Filed Under: Adobe Interview Questions, Amazon Interview Question, Flipkart Interview Questions, Interview Questions, Microsoft Interview Questions, problem Tagged With: Array, Stack

Reader Interactions

Primary Sidebar

Join WeekEnd Online/Offline Batch from 4-April-2020 on How to Crack Coding Interview in Just 10 Weeks : Fees just 20,000 INR

Join WeekEnd Online/Offline Batch from 4-April-2020

WhatsApp us

Secondary Sidebar

Custom Search

  • How I cracked AMAZON
  • LeetCode
  • Adobe
  • Amazon
  • Facebook
  • Microsoft
  • Hacker Earth
  • CSE Interview

Top Rated Questions

Test Cases for Round Function

Amazon Interview Experience – SDE Chennai

Fibonacci Hashing & Fastest Hashtable

Level order traversal in Spiral form

Stock Buy Sell to Maximize Profit

Implement a generic binary search algorithm for Integer Double String etc

C++ OOPs Part2

Count number of ways to reach a given score in a game

Minimum insertions to form a palindrome

System Design: Designing a LLD for Hotel Booking

DFS (Depth First Search)

C++ OOPs Part1

Reversal of LinkedList

Closed Parentheses checker

Edit Distance ( Dynamic Programming )

Length of the longest substring without repeating characters

Printing intermediate Integers between one element & next element of array

Convert number to words java

Given array of 0’s and 1’s. All 0’s are coming first followed by 1’s. find the position of first 1

Number of Islands BFS/DFS

Skiing on Mountains Matrix

BlueStone E-commerce Interview Experience

Maximum path sum between two leaves

N teams are participating. each team plays twice with all other teams. Some of them will go to the semi final. Find Minimum and Maximum number of matches that a team has to win to qualify for finals ?

Leetcode: Merge Intervals

Maximum size of square sub matrix with all 1’s in a binary matrix

Regular Expression Matching

Client Server C program

Memory Efficient LinkedList

simple sql injection

Copyright © 2025 · Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in