Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> generally what one wants is a selection of "best of breed" stocks > that are among the top ones in a variety of categories. (Relative > importance could be assigned to each category.) This is quite different and easier than the problem initially stated, because ranks must not be computed. 1) Compute the individual importance `ii' of each element `e' 2) Use the linear median algorithm to find the element `ek' whose individual importance `ii' is close to rank `k' of all elements `e', where `k' is the number of elements `e' acceptable as "best of the breed" 3) return all elements `e' whith `e.ii >= ek.ii'. This can be done by a sweep over the array. Please note, that this relies on having choosen the vector of relativ importances for the categories correctly. How does one know about this correctness? For example in marketing it is desired to occupy unique selling points, because the gain of profit might be huge. But this means, that also the loss for the seller is huge. In your example with body and hair length one might choose a candidate who simply has missed the haurdresser the day before. -manfred