Sliding Window

The Sliding Window pattern is a coding technique used for efficiently solving problems that involve subarrays or subsequence traversal in an array or string. It works by maintaining a “window” of elements within the array and sliding that window as you iterate through the elements.

Here’s a brief explanation of the Sliding Window pattern:

1. Initial Window: Start by defining a window with a certain number of elements (size). This window represents a subset of the array.
2. Process Window: Process the elements within the current window to calculate the desired result, such as sum, average, maximum, or any other relevant metric.
3. Slide Window: Slide the window to the right (or left) by one element. This means removing the leftmost element and adding the next element from the array to the window.
4. Update Result: Recalculate the result based on the new window’s contents.
5. Repeat: Continue sliding the window through the entire array until the window reaches the end.

The Sliding Window pattern is particularly useful when you need to find a subarray (or subsequence) that fulfills a certain condition (e.g., maximum sum, smallest subarray with sum greater than a threshold) or when you need to track a changing range of values.

The key advantage of the Sliding Window pattern is its efficiency. It reduces the time complexity of certain problems from O(n^2) to O(n) or O(n log n), making it a powerful technique for optimizing solutions.

In summary, the Sliding Window pattern is a technique used to solve problems involving subarrays or subsequences by maintaining a moving window of elements. It’s efficient and helps simplify the solution process for certain types of array-related problems.