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In computer science, selection sort is an in-place comparison sorting algorithm. It has a O ( n 2 ) time complexity , which makes it inefficient on large lists, and generally performs worse than the similar insertion sort .
As a baseline algorithm, selection of the th smallest value in a collection of values can be performed by the following two steps: . Sort the collection; If the output of the sorting algorithm is an array, retrieve its th element; otherwise, scan the sorted sequence to find the th element.
Selection sort is an in-place comparison sort. It has O(n 2) complexity, making it inefficient on large lists, and generally performs worse than the similar insertion sort. Selection sort is noted for its simplicity and also has performance advantages over more complicated algorithms in certain situations.
As an example, consider the sorting algorithms selection sort and insertion sort: selection sort repeatedly selects the minimum element from the unsorted remainder and places it at the front, which requires access to the entire input; it is thus an offline algorithm. On the other hand, insertion sort considers one input element per iteration ...
While some divide-and-conquer algorithms such as quicksort and mergesort outperform insertion sort for larger arrays, non-recursive sorting algorithms such as insertion sort or selection sort are generally faster for very small arrays (the exact size varies by environment and implementation, but is typically between 7 and 50 elements ...
A further relaxation requiring only a list of the k smallest elements, but without requiring that these be ordered, makes the problem equivalent to partition-based selection; the original partial sorting problem can be solved by such a selection algorithm to obtain an array where the first k elements are the k smallest, and sorting these, at a total cost of O(n + k log k) operations.
For example, the best case for a simple linear search on a list occurs when the desired element is the first element of the list. Development and choice of algorithms is rarely based on best-case performance: most academic and commercial enterprises are more interested in improving average-case complexity and worst-case performance .
In computer science, quickselect is a selection algorithm to find the kth smallest element in an unordered list, also known as the kth order statistic.Like the related quicksort sorting algorithm, it was developed by Tony Hoare, and thus is also known as Hoare's selection algorithm. [1]