• 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

Common Ancestor in a Binary Tree or Binary Search Tree

SAP Off Campus Hiring_ March 2015 Analytical Aptitude

Sort Stack in place

Find the number ABCD such that when multipled by 4 gives DCBA.

Walmart Labs Interview Experience

Mirror of Tree

Password Predictor

Serialise Deserialise N-ary Tree

Leetcode: Merge Intervals

C++ OOPs Part2

Flipkart Set 1 On Campus with Answers

Add Sub Multiply very large number stored as string

Find Pythagorean Triplets in an array in O(N)

LeetCode: Binary Tree Maximum Path Sum

Longest Increasing Subsequence

Trapping Rain Water

Maximum of all subarrays of size k

Python List

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 ?

Binary Tree Isomorphic to each other

CodeChef Code SGARDEN

SAP Interview Questions

C Program for TAIL command of UNIX

Sequence Finder Dynamic Programming

Adobe Interview Questions 8 month Exp

K’th Largest Element in BST when modification to BST is not allowed

Code Chef PRGIFT Solution

Python Array String

Best Java Book | Top Java Programming Book for Beginners

building with N steps, we can take 1,2,3 steps calculate number of ways to reach at top of building

Copyright © 2026 · Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in