# Analysis of algorithms

Last updated

In computer science, the analysis of algorithms is the process of finding the computational complexity of algorithms – the amount of time, storage, or other resources needed to execute them. Usually, this involves determining a function that relates the length of an algorithm's input to the number of steps it takes (its time complexity) or the number of storage locations it uses (its space complexity). An algorithm is said to be efficient when this function's values are small, or grow slowly compared to a growth in the size of the input. Different inputs of the same length may cause the algorithm to have different behavior, so best, worst and average case descriptions might all be of practical interest. When not otherwise specified, the function describing the performance of an algorithm is usually an upper bound, determined from the worst case inputs to the algorithm.

## Contents

The term "analysis of algorithms" was coined by Donald Knuth. [1] Algorithm analysis is an important part of a broader computational complexity theory, which provides theoretical estimates for the resources needed by any algorithm which solves a given computational problem. These estimates provide an insight into reasonable directions of search for efficient algorithms.

In theoretical analysis of algorithms it is common to estimate their complexity in the asymptotic sense, i.e., to estimate the complexity function for arbitrarily large input. Big O notation, Big-omega notation and Big-theta notation are used to this end. For instance, binary search is said to run in a number of steps proportional to the logarithm of the length of the sorted list being searched, or in O(log(n)), colloquially "in logarithmic time". Usually asymptotic estimates are used because different implementations of the same algorithm may differ in efficiency. However the efficiencies of any two "reasonable" implementations of a given algorithm are related by a constant multiplicative factor called a hidden constant.

Exact (not asymptotic) measures of efficiency can sometimes be computed but they usually require certain assumptions concerning the particular implementation of the algorithm, called model of computation. A model of computation may be defined in terms of an abstract computer, e.g., Turing machine, and/or by postulating that certain operations are executed in unit time. For example, if the sorted list to which we apply binary search has n elements, and we can guarantee that each lookup of an element in the list can be done in unit time, then at most log2n + 1 time units are needed to return an answer.

## Cost models

Time efficiency estimates depend on what we define to be a step. For the analysis to correspond usefully to the actual execution time, the time required to perform a step must be guaranteed to be bounded above by a constant. One must be careful here; for instance, some analyses count an addition of two numbers as one step. This assumption may not be warranted in certain contexts. For example, if the numbers involved in a computation may be arbitrarily large, the time required by a single addition can no longer be assumed to be constant.

Two cost models are generally used: [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

• the uniform cost model, also called uniform-cost measurement (and similar variations), assigns a constant cost to every machine operation, regardless of the size of the numbers involved
• the logarithmic cost model, also called logarithmic-cost measurement (and similar variations), assigns a cost to every machine operation proportional to the number of bits involved

The latter is more cumbersome to use, so it's only employed when necessary, for example in the analysis of arbitrary-precision arithmetic algorithms, like those used in cryptography.

A key point which is often overlooked is that published lower bounds for problems are often given for a model of computation that is more restricted than the set of operations that you could use in practice and therefore there are algorithms that are faster than what would naively be thought possible. [7]

## Run-time analysis

Run-time analysis is a theoretical classification that estimates and anticipates the increase in running time (or run-time) of an algorithm as its input size (usually denoted as n) increases. Run-time efficiency is a topic of great interest in computer science: A program can take seconds, hours, or even years to finish executing, depending on which algorithm it implements. While software profiling techniques can be used to measure an algorithm's run-time in practice, they cannot provide timing data for all infinitely many possible inputs; the latter can only be achieved by the theoretical methods of run-time analysis.

### Shortcomings of empirical metrics

Since algorithms are platform-independent (i.e. a given algorithm can be implemented in an arbitrary programming language on an arbitrary computer running an arbitrary operating system), there are additional significant drawbacks to using an empirical approach to gauge the comparative performance of a given set of algorithms.

Take as an example a program that looks up a specific entry in a sorted list of size n. Suppose this program were implemented on Computer A, a state-of-the-art machine, using a linear search algorithm, and on Computer B, a much slower machine, using a binary search algorithm. Benchmark testing on the two computers running their respective programs might look something like the following:

n (list size)Computer A run-time
(in nanoseconds)
Computer B run-time
(in nanoseconds)
168100,000
6332150,000
250125200,000
1,000500250,000

Based on these metrics, it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that Computer A is running an algorithm that is far superior in efficiency to that of Computer B. However, if the size of the input-list is increased to a sufficient number, that conclusion is dramatically demonstrated to be in error:

n (list size)Computer A run-time
(in nanoseconds)
Computer B run-time
(in nanoseconds)
168100,000
6332150,000
250125200,000
1,000500250,000
.........
1,000,000500,000500,000
4,000,0002,000,000550,000
16,000,0008,000,000600,000
.........
63,072 × 101231,536 × 1012 ns,
or 1 year
1,375,000 ns,
or 1.375 milliseconds

Computer A, running the linear search program, exhibits a linear growth rate. The program's run-time is directly proportional to its input size. Doubling the input size doubles the run time, quadrupling the input size quadruples the run-time, and so forth. On the other hand, Computer B, running the binary search program, exhibits a logarithmic growth rate. Quadrupling the input size only increases the run time by a constant amount (in this example, 50,000 ns). Even though Computer A is ostensibly a faster machine, Computer B will inevitably surpass Computer A in run-time because it's running an algorithm with a much slower growth rate.

### Orders of growth

Informally, an algorithm can be said to exhibit a growth rate on the order of a mathematical function if beyond a certain input size n, the function ${\displaystyle f(n)}$ times a positive constant provides an upper bound or limit for the run-time of that algorithm. In other words, for a given input size n greater than some n0 and a constant c, the running time of that algorithm will never be larger than ${\displaystyle c\times f(n)}$. This concept is frequently expressed using Big O notation. For example, since the run-time of insertion sort grows quadratically as its input size increases, insertion sort can be said to be of order O(n2).

Big O notation is a convenient way to express the worst-case scenario for a given algorithm, although it can also be used to express the average-case for example, the worst-case scenario for quicksort is O(n2), but the average-case run-time is O(n log n).

### Empirical orders of growth

Assuming the execution time follows power rule, t k na, the coefficient a can be found [8] by taking empirical measurements of run time ${\displaystyle \{t_{1},t_{2}\}}$ at some problem-size points ${\displaystyle \{n_{1},n_{2}\}}$, and calculating ${\displaystyle t_{2}/t_{1}=(n_{2}/n_{1})^{a}}$ so that ${\displaystyle a=\log(t_{2}/t_{1})/\log(n_{2}/n_{1})}$. In other words, this measures the slope of the empirical line on the log–log plot of execution time vs. problem size, at some size point. If the order of growth indeed follows the power rule (and so the line on log–log plot is indeed a straight line), the empirical value of a will stay constant at different ranges, and if not, it will change (and the line is a curved line) - but still could serve for comparison of any two given algorithms as to their empirical local orders of growth behaviour. Applied to the above table:

n (list size)Computer A run-time
(in nanoseconds)
Local order of growth
(n^_)
Computer B run-time
(in nanoseconds)
Local order of growth
(n^_)
157100,000
65321.04150,0000.28
2501251.01200,0000.21
1,0005001.00250,0000.16
.........
1,000,000500,0001.00500,0000.10
4,000,0002,000,0001.00550,0000.07
16,000,0008,000,0001.00600,0000.06
.........

It is clearly seen that the first algorithm exhibits a linear order of growth indeed following the power rule. The empirical values for the second one are diminishing rapidly, suggesting it follows another rule of growth and in any case has much lower local orders of growth (and improving further still), empirically, than the first one.

### Evaluating run-time complexity

The run-time complexity for the worst-case scenario of a given algorithm can sometimes be evaluated by examining the structure of the algorithm and making some simplifying assumptions. Consider the following pseudocode:

1    get a positive integer n from input 2    if n > 10 3        print "This might take a while..." 4    for i = 1 to n 5        for j = 1 to i 6            print i * j 7    print "Done!"

A given computer will take a discrete amount of time to execute each of the instructions involved with carrying out this algorithm. The specific amount of time to carry out a given instruction will vary depending on which instruction is being executed and which computer is executing it, but on a conventional computer, this amount will be deterministic. [9] Say that the actions carried out in step 1 are considered to consume time T1, step 2 uses time T2, and so forth.

In the algorithm above, steps 1, 2 and 7 will only be run once. For a worst-case evaluation, it should be assumed that step 3 will be run as well. Thus the total amount of time to run steps 1-3 and step 7 is:

${\displaystyle T_{1}+T_{2}+T_{3}+T_{7}.\,}$

The loops in steps 4, 5 and 6 are trickier to evaluate. The outer loop test in step 4 will execute ( n + 1 ) times (note that an extra step is required to terminate the for loop, hence n + 1 and not n executions), which will consume T4( n + 1 ) time. The inner loop, on the other hand, is governed by the value of j, which iterates from 1 to i. On the first pass through the outer loop, j iterates from 1 to 1: The inner loop makes one pass, so running the inner loop body (step 6) consumes T6 time, and the inner loop test (step 5) consumes 2T5 time. During the next pass through the outer loop, j iterates from 1 to 2: the inner loop makes two passes, so running the inner loop body (step 6) consumes 2T6 time, and the inner loop test (step 5) consumes 3T5 time.

Altogether, the total time required to run the inner loop body can be expressed as an arithmetic progression:

${\displaystyle T_{6}+2T_{6}+3T_{6}+\cdots +(n-1)T_{6}+nT_{6}}$

which can be factored [10] as

${\displaystyle T_{6}\left[1+2+3+\cdots +(n-1)+n\right]=T_{6}\left[{\frac {1}{2}}(n^{2}+n)\right]}$

The total time required to run the outer loop test can be evaluated similarly:

{\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}&2T_{5}+3T_{5}+4T_{5}+\cdots +(n-1)T_{5}+nT_{5}+(n+1)T_{5}\\=\ &T_{5}+2T_{5}+3T_{5}+4T_{5}+\cdots +(n-1)T_{5}+nT_{5}+(n+1)T_{5}-T_{5}\end{aligned}}}

which can be factored as

{\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}&T_{5}\left[1+2+3+\cdots +(n-1)+n+(n+1)\right]-T_{5}\\=&\left[{\frac {1}{2}}(n^{2}+n)\right]T_{5}+(n+1)T_{5}-T_{5}\\=&T_{5}\left[{\frac {1}{2}}(n^{2}+n)\right]+nT_{5}\\=&\left[{\frac {1}{2}}(n^{2}+3n)\right]T_{5}\end{aligned}}}

Therefore, the total running time for this algorithm is:

${\displaystyle f(n)=T_{1}+T_{2}+T_{3}+T_{7}+(n+1)T_{4}+\left[{\frac {1}{2}}(n^{2}+n)\right]T_{6}+\left[{\frac {1}{2}}(n^{2}+3n)\right]T_{5}}$

which reduces to

${\displaystyle f(n)=\left[{\frac {1}{2}}(n^{2}+n)\right]T_{6}+\left[{\frac {1}{2}}(n^{2}+3n)\right]T_{5}+(n+1)T_{4}+T_{1}+T_{2}+T_{3}+T_{7}}$

As a rule-of-thumb, one can assume that the highest-order term in any given function dominates its rate of growth and thus defines its run-time order. In this example, n2 is the highest-order term, so one can conclude that f(n) = O(n2). Formally this can be proven as follows:

Prove that ${\displaystyle \left[{\frac {1}{2}}(n^{2}+n)\right]T_{6}+\left[{\frac {1}{2}}(n^{2}+3n)\right]T_{5}+(n+1)T_{4}+T_{1}+T_{2}+T_{3}+T_{7}\leq cn^{2},\ n\geq n_{0}}$

{\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}&\left[{\frac {1}{2}}(n^{2}+n)\right]T_{6}+\left[{\frac {1}{2}}(n^{2}+3n)\right]T_{5}+(n+1)T_{4}+T_{1}+T_{2}+T_{3}+T_{7}\\\leq &(n^{2}+n)T_{6}+(n^{2}+3n)T_{5}+(n+1)T_{4}+T_{1}+T_{2}+T_{3}+T_{7}\ ({\text{for }}n\geq 0)\end{aligned}}}

Let k be a constant greater than or equal to [T1..T7]

{\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}&T_{6}(n^{2}+n)+T_{5}(n^{2}+3n)+(n+1)T_{4}+T_{1}+T_{2}+T_{3}+T_{7}\leq k(n^{2}+n)+k(n^{2}+3n)+kn+5k\\=&2kn^{2}+5kn+5k\leq 2kn^{2}+5kn^{2}+5kn^{2}\ ({\text{for }}n\geq 1)=12kn^{2}\end{aligned}}}

Therefore ${\displaystyle \left[{\frac {1}{2}}(n^{2}+n)\right]T_{6}+\left[{\frac {1}{2}}(n^{2}+3n)\right]T_{5}+(n+1)T_{4}+T_{1}+T_{2}+T_{3}+T_{7}\leq cn^{2},n\geq n_{0}{\text{ for }}c=12k,n_{0}=1}$

A more elegant approach to analyzing this algorithm would be to declare that [T1..T7] are all equal to one unit of time, in a system of units chosen so that one unit is greater than or equal to the actual times for these steps. This would mean that the algorithm's running time breaks down as follows: [11]

${\displaystyle 4+\sum _{i=1}^{n}i\leq 4+\sum _{i=1}^{n}n=4+n^{2}\leq 5n^{2}\ ({\text{for }}n\geq 1)=O(n^{2}).}$

### Growth rate analysis of other resources

The methodology of run-time analysis can also be utilized for predicting other growth rates, such as consumption of memory space. As an example, consider the following pseudocode which manages and reallocates memory usage by a program based on the size of a file which that program manages:

whilefile is still open:let n = size of fileforevery 100,000 kilobytes of increase in file sizedouble the amount of memory reserved

In this instance, as the file size n increases, memory will be consumed at an exponential growth rate, which is order O(2n). This is an extremely rapid and most likely unmanageable growth rate for consumption of memory resources.

## Relevance

Algorithm analysis is important in practice because the accidental or unintentional use of an inefficient algorithm can significantly impact system performance. In time-sensitive applications, an algorithm taking too long to run can render its results outdated or useless. An inefficient algorithm can also end up requiring an uneconomical amount of computing power or storage in order to run, again rendering it practically useless.

## Constant factors

Analysis of algorithms typically focuses on the asymptotic performance, particularly at the elementary level, but in practical applications constant factors are important, and real-world data is in practice always limited in size. The limit is typically the size of addressable memory, so on 32-bit machines 232 = 4 GiB (greater if segmented memory is used) and on 64-bit machines 264 = 16 EiB. Thus given a limited size, an order of growth (time or space) can be replaced by a constant factor, and in this sense all practical algorithms are O(1) for a large enough constant, or for small enough data.

This interpretation is primarily useful for functions that grow extremely slowly: (binary) iterated logarithm (log*) is less than 5 for all practical data (265536 bits); (binary) log-log (log log n) is less than 6 for virtually all practical data (264 bits); and binary log (log n) is less than 64 for virtually all practical data (264 bits). An algorithm with non-constant complexity may nonetheless be more efficient than an algorithm with constant complexity on practical data if the overhead of the constant time algorithm results in a larger constant factor, e.g., one may have ${\displaystyle K>k\log \log n}$ so long as ${\displaystyle K/k>6}$ and ${\displaystyle n<2^{2^{6}}=2^{64}}$.

For large data linear or quadratic factors cannot be ignored, but for small data an asymptotically inefficient algorithm may be more efficient. This is particularly used in hybrid algorithms, like Timsort, which use an asymptotically efficient algorithm (here merge sort, with time complexity ${\displaystyle n\log n}$), but switch to an asymptotically inefficient algorithm (here insertion sort, with time complexity ${\displaystyle n^{2}}$) for small data, as the simpler algorithm is faster on small data.

## Notes

1. "Knuth: Recent News". web.archive.org. 28 August 2016.
2. Alfred V. Aho; John E. Hopcroft; Jeffrey D. Ullman (1974). . Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., section 1.3
3. Juraj Hromkovič (2004). Theoretical computer science: introduction to Automata, computability, complexity, algorithmics, randomization, communication, and cryptography. Springer. pp. 177–178. ISBN   978-3-540-14015-3.
4. Giorgio Ausiello (1999). Complexity and approximation: combinatorial optimization problems and their approximability properties. Springer. pp. 3–8. ISBN   978-3-540-65431-5.
5. Wegener, Ingo (2005), Complexity theory: exploring the limits of efficient algorithms, Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag, p. 20, ISBN   978-3-540-21045-0
6. Robert Endre Tarjan (1983). Data structures and network algorithms. SIAM. pp. 3–7. ISBN   978-0-89871-187-5.
7. Examples of the price of abstraction?, cstheory.stackexchange.com
8. How To Avoid O-Abuse and Bribes Archived 2017-03-08 at the Wayback Machine , at the blog "Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP" by R. J. Lipton, professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech, recounting idea by Robert Sedgewick
9. However, this is not the case with a quantum computer
10. It can be proven by induction that ${\displaystyle 1+2+3+\cdots +(n-1)+n={\frac {n(n+1)}{2}}}$
11. This approach, unlike the above approach, neglects the constant time consumed by the loop tests which terminate their respective loops, but it is trivial to prove that such omission does not affect the final result

## Related Research Articles

In computer science, binary search, also known as half-interval search, logarithmic search, or binary chop, is a search algorithm that finds the position of a target value within a sorted array. Binary search compares the target value to the middle element of the array. If they are not equal, the half in which the target cannot lie is eliminated and the search continues on the remaining half, again taking the middle element to compare to the target value, and repeating this until the target value is found. If the search ends with the remaining half being empty, the target is not in the array.

In computer science, the computational complexity, or simply complexity of an algorithm is the amount of resources required for running it. The computational complexity of a problem is the minimum of the complexities of all possible algorithms for this problem.

In computer science, a sorting algorithm is an algorithm that puts elements of a list in a certain order. The most frequently used orders are numerical order and lexicographical order. Efficient sorting is important for optimizing the efficiency of other algorithms that require input data to be in sorted lists. Sorting is also often useful for canonicalizing data and for producing human-readable output. More formally, the output of any sorting algorithm must satisfy two conditions:

1. The output is in nondecreasing order ;
2. The output is a permutation of the input.

Big O notation is a mathematical notation that describes the limiting behavior of a function when the argument tends towards a particular value or infinity. It is a member of a family of notations invented by Paul Bachmann, Edmund Landau, and others, collectively called Bachmann–Landau notation or asymptotic notation.

Shellsort, also known as Shell sort or Shell's method, is an in-place comparison sort. It can be seen as either a generalization of sorting by exchange or sorting by insertion. The method starts by sorting pairs of elements far apart from each other, then progressively reducing the gap between elements to be compared. Starting with far apart elements, it can move some out-of-place elements into position faster than a simple nearest neighbor exchange. Donald Shell published the first version of this sort in 1959. The running time of Shellsort is heavily dependent on the gap sequence it uses. For many practical variants, determining their time complexity remains an open problem.

Exponential growth is a specific way that a quantity may increase over time. It occurs when the instantaneous rate of change of a quantity with respect to time is proportional to the quantity itself. Described as a function, a quantity undergoing exponential growth is an exponential function of time, that is, the variable representing time is the exponent.

In computer science, the Akra–Bazzi method, or Akra–Bazzi theorem, is used to analyze the asymptotic behavior of the mathematical recurrences that appear in the analysis of divide and conquer algorithms where the sub-problems have substantially different sizes. It is a generalization of the master theorem for divide-and-conquer recurrences, which assumes that the sub-problems have equal size. It is named after mathematicians Mohamad Akra and Louay Bazzi.

The Cooley–Tukey algorithm, named after J. W. Cooley and John Tukey, is the most common fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm. It re-expresses the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of an arbitrary composite size N = N1N2 in terms of N1 smaller DFTs of sizes N2, recursively, to reduce the computation time to O(N log N) for highly composite N. Because of the algorithm's importance, specific variants and implementation styles have become known by their own names, as described below.

In computer science, the time complexity is the computational complexity that describes the amount of time it takes to run an algorithm. Time complexity is commonly estimated by counting the number of elementary operations performed by the algorithm, supposing that each elementary operation takes a fixed amount of time to perform. Thus, the amount of time taken and the number of elementary operations performed by the algorithm are taken to differ by at most a constant factor.

A randomized algorithm is an algorithm that employs a degree of randomness as part of its logic. The algorithm typically uses uniformly random bits as an auxiliary input to guide its behavior, in the hope of achieving good performance in the "average case" over all possible choices of random bits. Formally, the algorithm's performance will be a random variable determined by the random bits; thus either the running time, or the output are random variables.

In the analysis of algorithms, the master theorem for divide-and-conquer recurrences provides an asymptotic analysis for recurrence relations of types that occur in the analysis of many divide and conquer algorithms. The approach was first presented by Jon Bentley, Dorothea Haken, and James B. Saxe in 1980, where it was described as a "unifying method" for solving such recurrences. The name "master theorem" was popularized by the widely used algorithms textbook Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein.

In computer science, parameterized complexity is a branch of computational complexity theory that focuses on classifying computational problems according to their inherent difficulty with respect to multiple parameters of the input or output. The complexity of a problem is then measured as a function of those parameters. This allows the classification of NP-hard problems on a finer scale than in the classical setting, where the complexity of a problem is only measured by the number of bits in the input. The first systematic work on parameterized complexity was done by Downey & Fellows (1999).

In mathematical analysis, asymptotic analysis, also known as asymptotics, is a method of describing limiting behavior.

The Euclidean minimum spanning tree or EMST is a minimum spanning tree of a set of n points in the plane, where the weight of the edge between each pair of points is the Euclidean distance between those two points. In simpler terms, an EMST connects a set of dots using lines such that the total length of all the lines is minimized and any dot can be reached from any other by following the lines.

Quicksort is an efficient sorting algorithm. Developed by British computer scientist Tony Hoare in 1959 and published in 1961, it is still a commonly used algorithm for sorting. When implemented well, it can be about two or three times faster than its main competitors, merge sort and heapsort.

In computer science, an algorithm is said to be asymptotically optimal if, roughly speaking, for large inputs it performs at worst a constant factor worse than the best possible algorithm. It is a term commonly encountered in computer science research as a result of widespread use of big-O notation.

In mathematics, logarithmic growth describes a phenomenon whose size or cost can be described as a logarithm function of some input. e.g. y = C log (x). Note that any logarithm base can be used, since one can be converted to another by multiplying by a fixed constant. Logarithmic growth is the inverse of exponential growth and is very slow.

Because matrix multiplication is such a central operation in many numerical algorithms, much work has been invested in making matrix multiplication algorithms efficient. Applications of matrix multiplication in computational problems are found in many fields including scientific computing and pattern recognition and in seemingly unrelated problems such as counting the paths through a graph. Many different algorithms have been designed for multiplying matrices on different types of hardware, including parallel and distributed systems, where the computational work is spread over multiple processors.

In computer science, the median of medians is an approximate (median) selection algorithm, frequently used to supply a good pivot for an exact selection algorithm, mainly the quickselect, that selects the kth largest element of an initially unsorted array. Median of medians finds an approximate median in linear time only, which is limited but an additional overhead for quickselect. When this approximate median is used as an improved pivot, the worst-case complexity of quickselect reduces significantly from quadratic to linear, which is also the asymptotically optimal worst-case complexity of any selection algorithm. In other words, the median of medians is an approximate median-selection algorithm that helps building an asymptotically optimal, exact general selection algorithm, by producing good pivot elements.

In computer science, a parallel external memory (PEM) model is a cache-aware, external-memory abstract machine. It is the parallel-computing analogy to the single-processor external memory (EM) model. In a similar way, it is the cache-aware analogy to the parallel random-access machine (PRAM). The PEM model consists of a number of processors, together with their respective private caches and a shared main memory.