#3002

Maximum Size of a Set After Removals

Medium
ArrayHash TableGreedyHash MapArray
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Approaches

Brute ForceOptimal
Complexity Comparison
Brute ForceOptimal Solution
Time
O(n²)
O(n)
Space
O(1)
O(n)
💡

Intuition

Time O(n)Space O(n)

The optimal approach uses a greedy strategy to maximize the unique elements in the resulting set by counting the occurrences of elements in both arrays and strategically choosing which elements to keep.

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Algorithm

3 steps
  1. 1Step 1: Count the frequency of each element in both nums1 and nums2.
  2. 2Step 2: Create a set of unique elements from both arrays.
  3. 3Step 3: Calculate the maximum possible size of the set by keeping unique elements while ensuring we only keep n/2 elements from each array.
solution.py9 lines
1# Full working Python code
2from collections import Counter
3
4def maxSetSize(nums1, nums2):
5    count1 = Counter(nums1)
6    count2 = Counter(nums2)
7    unique_elements = set(nums1) | set(nums2)
8    max_size = min(len(unique_elements), len(nums1) // 2 + len(nums2) // 2)
9    return max_size

Complexity note: The complexity is O(n) because we only pass through the arrays a couple of times to count elements and create a set of unique values.

  • 1Maximizing unique elements requires careful selection of which elements to keep.
  • 2Using frequency counts helps in determining the best strategy for removals.

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