Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Post History

75%
+4 −0
Q&A How do I find disjoint sets in a dataset

One way of specifying what you want is that you want the equivalence classes of the equivalence relation generated by saying that pairs (a, b) and (x, y) are equal when either a = x or b = y. The f...

posted 1y ago by Derek Elkins‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Derek Elkins‭ · 2023-06-28T19:48:56Z (over 1 year ago)
One way of specifying what you want is that you want the equivalence classes of the equivalence relation generated by saying that pairs (a, b) and (x, y) are equal when either a = x or b = y. The famous [union-find algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjoint-set_data_structure) solves exactly the problem of incrementally computing representatives for an equivalence relation as more generating identifications are added.

In your case, you can simply maintain a hash map, e.g. a Python dictionary, (or an array if your IDs are dense) that maps `car_id` to a pair's ID in the union-find data structure, and similarly for `user_id`. You then simply iterate over all the pairs looking up the union-find ID in each of these maps and equating ("unioning") it with the union-find ID of the pair you're currently considering. If one or both of the maps don't have an entry for the current pair, insert the representative ID you got back from unioning with the other or the current pair's ID if entries were missing from both maps into the map(s) with the missing entry.

The hash table look-ups are effectively constant-time and union-find, famously, has an inverse Ackermann amortized time-complexity that might as well be constant-time. This gives an algorithm that's effectively linear-time in the number of pairs. The above algorithm will automatically handle duplicates, but you could also remove duplicates first. If you actually want to keep track of the duplicates (via some surrogate key effectively), you can easily just have the union-find ID be based on the surrogate key, e.g. the index in the list of pairs or you could just go back over the list after the fact grouping pairs by the representative IDs.

Union-find is a fairly easy algorithm to implement, though I recommend a slight variation, also easy to implement, called Rem's algorithm. See [Experiments on Union-Find Algorithms for the Disjoint-Set Data Structure](https://www.ii.uib.no/~fredrikm/fredrik/papers/SEA2010.pdf).

I'm pretty sure there are other, quite possibly better, ways of doing this, but this is already relatively simple and efficient.