Overlapping intervals

Once again this is an interview question that was asked to me at Adobe.

You have N pairs of intervals, say integers. You're required to identify all intervals that overlap with each other in O(N logN) time. For example, if you have

{1, 3} {12, 14} {2, 4} {13, 15} {5, 10}

the answer is {1, 3}, {12, 14}, {2, 4}, {13, 15}. Note that you don't need to group them, so the result can be in any order like in the example.

Comments

  1. Preprocessing time for Interval tree is O(nlogn);
    How it will take O(n) time?
    If you please practically elaborate your approach it will be helpful.

    ReplyDelete
  2. sorry that was typo error.it should be o(nlogn)

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  3. Sir, why do we need an interval tree.
    Plz check my approach.
    Assume the elements are struct/pairs of { start_time, finish_time };
    Apply randomised quick-sort algorithm to sort the array based on finish_time.
    Now for each element ,we can check if its start_time overlaps with the finish_time of previous element.

    Doubt :- What if the array can has two exclusive groups which are non-overlapping, but each group has k elements which are overlapping.
    Which group of elements to print.
    The array approach can be trimmed to print each such group separately

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