Subarray Sum

Given an array of integers and an integer target, find a subarray that sums to target and return the start and end indices of the subarray. It's guaranteed to have a unique solution.

Input:

1 -20 -3 30 5 4
7

Output: 1 4

Explanation: -20 - 3 + 30 = 7. The indices for subarray [-20,-3,30] is 1 and 4 (right exclusive).

Try it yourself

Explanation

Intuition

The brute force way is to find the sum of each subarray and compare it with the target. Let N be the number of elements in the array. There are N subarrays with size 1, N-1 subarrays with size 2 .. and 1 subarray with size N. Time complexity is O(N^2).

A key observation is the the sum of a subarray [i, j] is equal to the sum of [0, j] minus the sum of [0, i - 1].

The sum of elements from index 0 to i is called the prefix sum. If we have the subarray sum for each index, we can find the sum of any subarray in constant time.

With the knowledge of prefix sum under our belt, the problem boils down to Two Sum. We keep a dictionary of prefix_sum: index while going through the array calculating prefix_sum. If at any point, prefix_sum - target is in the dictionary we have found our subarray.

Time Complexity: O(n)

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Solution

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from typing import List
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def subarray_sum(arr: List[int], target: int) -> List[int]:
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    # WRITE YOUR BRILLIANT CODE HERE
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    # prefix_sum 0 happens when we have an empty array
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    return []
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    prefix_sums = {0: 0}
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    cur_sum = 0
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    for i in range(len(arr)):
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        cur_sum += arr[i]
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        complement = cur_sum - target
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        if complement in prefix_sums:
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            return [prefix_sums[complement], i + 1]
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        prefix_sums[cur_sum] = i + 1
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if __name__ == '__main__':
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    arr = [int(x) for x in input().split()]
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    target = int(input())
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    res = subarray_sum(arr, target)
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    print(' '.join(map(str, res)))
Note that in the implementation, typically we use prefix_sum[i] to denote the sum of elements in 0...i - 1 (rightmost element i is not included in the sum). One good thing about this is prefix_sum[0] then means sum of array up to but not including the first element, i.e. empty array. The definition of empty array sum is useful when there exists a subarray starting from 0 that sums up to the target. Without the definition of empty array sum we would miss it because its complement 0 does not exist in the dictionary.
Follow up
Find the total number of subarrays that sums up to target.
Explanation
Since the new problem does not ask for index but total number instead, we can change our hashmap to "sum k: number of prefix sums that sums up to k".
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from typing import List
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from typing import Counter, List
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def subarray_sum_total(arr: List[int], target: int) -> int:
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    # WRITE YOUR BRILLIANT CODE HERE
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    prefix_sums = Counter()
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    return 0
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    prefix_sums[0] = 1 # since empty array's sum is 0
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    cur_sum = 0
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    count = 0
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    for i in range(len(arr)):
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        cur_sum += arr[i]
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        complement = cur_sum - target
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        if complement in prefix_sums:
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            count += prefix_sums[complement]
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        prefix_sums[cur_sum] += 1
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    return count
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if __name__ == '__main__':
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    arr = [int(x) for x in input().split()]
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    target = int(input())
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    res = subarray_sum_total(arr, target)
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    print(res)