LeetCode - Median of Two Sorted Arrays

Problem description

description

There are two sorted arrays nums1 and nums2 of size m and n respectively.

Find the median of the two sorted arrays. The overall run time complexity should be O(log (m+n)).

You may assume nums1 and nums2 cannot be both empty.

Example 1:

nums1 = [1, 3]
nums2 = [2]

The median is 2.0

Example 2:

nums1 = [1, 2]
nums2 = [3, 4]

The median is (2 + 3)/2 = 2.5

Analysis

Basic idea is to find a fixed index in array1 and find the corresponding index in array2 to check whether is median.

To make sure the index for array2 not out of bound, we should make array1 the smaller array.

A detailed explanation

Here’s the code:

class Solution {
    public double findMedianSortedArrays(int[] A, int[] B) {
        int m = A.length;
        int n = B.length;
        if (m > n) { // to ensure m<=n
            int[] temp = A; A = B; B = temp;
            int tmp = m; m = n; n = tmp;
        }
        int iMin = 0, iMax = m, halfLen = (m + n + 1) / 2;
        while (iMin <= iMax) {
            int i = (iMin + iMax) / 2;
            int j = halfLen - i;
            if (i < iMax && B[j-1] > A[i]){
                iMin = i + 1; // i is too small
            }
            else if (i > iMin && A[i-1] > B[j]) {
                iMax = i - 1; // i is too big
            }
            else { // i is perfect
                int maxLeft = 0;
                if (i == 0) { maxLeft = B[j-1]; }
                else if (j == 0) { maxLeft = A[i-1]; }
                else { maxLeft = Math.max(A[i-1], B[j-1]); }
                if ( (m + n) % 2 == 1 ) { return maxLeft; }

                int minRight = 0;
                if (i == m) { minRight = B[j]; }
                else if (j == n) { minRight = A[i]; }
                else { minRight = Math.min(B[j], A[i]); }

                return (maxLeft + minRight) / 2.0;
            }
        }
        return 0.0;
    }
}

What to improve

• use logic to analysis question and graph to help understand it.