2009. Minimum Number of Operations to Make Array Continuous

Problem

You are given an integer array nums. In one operation, you can replace any element in nums with any integer.

nums is considered continuous if both of the following conditions are fulfilled:

• All elements in nums are unique.

• The difference between the maximum element and the minimum element in nums equals nums.length - 1.

For example, nums = [4, 2, 5, 3] is continuous, but nums = [1, 2, 3, 5, 6] is not continuous.

Return **the *minimum* number of operations to make nums **continuous.

  Example 1:

Input: nums = [4,2,5,3]
Output: 0
Explanation: nums is already continuous.

Example 2:

Input: nums = [1,2,3,5,6]
Output: 1
Explanation: One possible solution is to change the last element to 4.
The resulting array is [1,2,3,5,4], which is continuous.

Example 3:

Input: nums = [1,10,100,1000]
Output: 3
Explanation: One possible solution is to:
- Change the second element to 2.
- Change the third element to 3.
- Change the fourth element to 4.
The resulting array is [1,2,3,4], which is continuous.

  Constraints:

• 1 <= nums.length <= 10^5

• 1 <= nums[i] <= 10^9

Solution

class Solution {
    public int minOperations(int[] nums) {
        Arrays.sort(nums);
        int n = nums.length;
        int duplicates = 0;
        int maxContinuous = 0;
        int start = 0;
        int end = 0;
        while (end < n) {
            if (end > 0 && nums[end] == nums[end - 1]) {
                duplicates++;
            }
            while (nums[start] + n <= nums[end]) {
                start++;
                if (nums[start] == nums[start - 1]) {
                    duplicates--;
                }
            }
            maxContinuous = Math.max(maxContinuous, end - start + 1 - duplicates);
            end++;
        }
        return n - maxContinuous;
    }
}

Explain:

nope.

Complexity:

• Time complexity : O(n).
• Space complexity : O(n).