Kth Largest Element in an Array — Medium Coding Interview Question

Given an integer array nums and an integer k, return the kth largest element in the array. Note that it is the kth largest element in sorted order, not the kth distinct element.

Example

Input: nums = [3,2,1,5,6,4], k = 2

Output: 5

Constraints

• 1 ≤ k ≤ nums.length ≤ 10⁵
• -10⁴ ≤ nums[i] ≤ 10⁴

Topics & Companies

Topics: heap, sorting

Asked by: Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple

Optimal Solution Complexity

Time complexity: O(n) Average. Space complexity: O(1).

Practice more

• All DSA Problems
• DSA Patterns