Question

This is an algorithmic question.

I have got Dictionary<object,Queue<object>>. Each queue contains one or more elements in it. I want to remove all queues with only one element from the dictionary. What is the fastest way to do it?

Pseudo-code: foreach(item in dict) if(item.Length==1) dict.Remove(item);

It is easy to do it in a loop (not foreach, of course), but I’d like to know which approach is the fastest one here.

Why I want it: I use that dictionary to find duplicate elements in a large set of objects. The Key in dictionary is kind of a hash of the object, the Value is a queue of all objects found with the same hash. Since I want only duplicates, I need to remove all items with just a single object in associated queue.

Update:

It may be important to know that in a regular case there are just a few duplicates in a large set of objects. Let’s assume 1% or less. So possibly it could be faster to leave the Dictionary as is and create a new one from scatch with just selected elements from the first one… and then deelte the first Dictionary completely. I think it depends on the comlpexity of computational Dictionary class’s methods used in particular algorithms.

I really want to see this problem on a theoretical level because as a teacher I want to discuss it with students. I didn’t provide any concrete solution myself because I think it is really easy to do it. The question is which approach is the best, the fastest.

Answer 1

It stead of trying to optimize the traversing of the collection how about optimizing the content of the collection so that it only includes the duplicates? This would require changing your collection algorithm instead to something like this

var duplicates = new Dictionary<object,Queue<object>>;
var possibleDuplicates = new Dictionary<object,object>();
foreach(var item in original){
    if(possibleDuplicates.ContainsKey(item)){
       duplicates.Add(item, new Queue<object>{possibleDuplicates[item],item});
       possibleDuplicates.Remove(item);
    } else if(duplicates.ContainsKey(item)){
       duplicates[item].Add(item);
    } else {
       possibleDuplicates.Add(item);
    }
}