This is a popular interview question that requires the candidate to demonstrate their knowledge of basic programming concepts, such as arrays, loops, and conditionals. The problem statement requires the candidate to write a program that finds the kth largest element in an array of integers.
The simplest approach to solve this problem is to sort the array in descending order and return the kth element. The following code snippet shows how this can be achieved in Python:
def kth_largest_element(arr, k):
arr.sort(reverse=True)
return arr[k-1]
This function takes an array of integers and a value k as input parameters. It then sorts the array in descending order using the sort() method and returns the kth element of the array. Note that we subtract 1 from k to account for zero-based indexing in Python.
Another approach to solve this problem is to use a min-heap of size k to store the k largest elements of the array. The following code snippet shows how this can be achieved in Java:
import java.util.*;
public class KthLargestElement {
public int findKthLargest(int[] nums, int k) {
PriorityQueue<Integer> minHeap = new PriorityQueue<Integer>();
for(int i = 0; i < nums.length; i++) {
if(i < k) {
minHeap.add(nums[i]);
}
else if(nums[i] > minHeap.peek()) {
minHeap.poll();
minHeap.add(nums[i]);
}
}
return minHeap.peek();
}
}
This Java implementation uses a PriorityQueue data structure to maintain the k largest elements of the array. We initialize an empty min-heap of size k and iterate over the array. If the heap size is less than k, we add the current element to the heap. If the heap size is greater than or equal to k, we compare the current element with the minimum element in the heap, and if the current element is larger, we remove the minimum element from the heap and add the current element. Finally, we return the minimum element from the heap, which is the kth largest element in the array.