What is the Big-O Notation for this code? - c++

Question

I am having trouble deciding between N^2 and NlogN as the Big O? Whats throwing me off is the third nested for loop from k <=j. How do I reconcile this?
int Max_Subsequence_Sum( const int A[], const int N )
{
int This_Sum = 0, Max_Sum = 0;
for (int i=0; i<N; i++)
{
for (int j=i; j<N; j++)
{
This_Sum = 0;
for (int k=i; k<=j; k++)
{
This_Sum += A[k];
}
if (This_Sum > Max_Sum)
{
Max_Sum = This_Sum;
}
}
}
return Max_Sum;
}

Answer 1

This can be done with estimation or analysis. Looking at the inner most loop there are j-i operations inside the second loop. To get the total number of operations one would sum to get :
(1+N)(2 N + N^2) / 6
Making the algorithm O(N^3). To estimate one can see that there are three loops which at some point have O(N) calls thus it's O(N^3).

Answer 2

Let us analyze the most inner loop first:
for (int k=i; k <= j; k++) {
This_Sum += A[k];
}
Here the counter k iterates from i (inclusive) to j (inclusive), this thus means that the body of the for loop is performed j-i+1 times. If we assume that fetching the k-th number from an array is done in constant time, and the arithmetic operations (incrementing k, calculating the sum of This_Sum and A[k], and comparking k with j), then this thus runs in O(j-i).
The initialization of This_Sum and the if statement is not significant:
This_Sum = 0;
// ...
if (This_Sum > Max_Sum) {
Max_Sum = This_Sum;
}
indeed, if we can compare two numbers in constant time, and set one variable to the value hold by another value in constant time, then regardless whether the condition holds or not, the number of operations is fixed.
Now we can take a look at the loop in the middle, and abstract away the most inner loop:
for (int j=i; j < N; j++) {
// constant number of oprations
// j-i+1 operations
// constant number of operations
}
Here j ranges from i to N, so that means that the total number of operations is:
N
---
\
/ j - i + 1
---
j=i
This sum is equivalent to:
N
---
\
(N-j) * (1 - i) + / j
---
j=i
This is an arithmetic sum [wiki] and it is equivalent to:
(N - i + 1) × ((1 - i) + (i+N) / 2) = (N - i + 1) × ((N-i) / 2 + 1)
or when we expand this:
i2/2 + 3×N/2 - 3×i/2 + N2/2 - N×i + 1
So that means that we can now focus on the outer loop:
for (int i=0; i<N; i++) {
// i2/2 + 3×N/2 - 3×i/2 + N2/2 - N×i + 1
}
So now we can again calculate the number of operations with:
N
---
\
/ i2/2 + 3×N/2 - 3×i/2 + N2/2 - N×i + 1
---
i=0
We can use Faulhaber's formula [wiki] here to solve this sum, and obtain:
(N+1)×(N2+5×N+6)/6
or in expanded form:
N3/6 + N2 + 11×N/6 + 1
which is thus an O(n3) algorithm.