Given a list of integers l, how can I partition it into 2 lists a and b such that d(a,b) = abs(sum(a) - sum(b)) is minimum. I know the problem is NP-complete, so I am looking for a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm i.e. O(c*n) where c = sum(l map abs). I looked at Wikipedia but the algorithm there is to partition it into exact halves which is a special case of what I am looking for...
EDIT:
To clarify, I am looking for the exact partitions a and b and not just the resulting minimum difference d(a, b)
To generalize, what is a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm to partition a list of n numbers into k groups g1, g2 ...gk such that (max(S) - min(S)).abs is as small as possible where S = [sum(g1), sum(g2), ... sum(gk)]
A naive, trivial and still pseudo-polynomial solution would be to use the existing solution to subset-sum, and repeat for sum(array)/2to 0 (and return the first one found).
Complexity of this solution will be O(W^2*n) where W is the sum of the array.
pseudo code:
for cand from sum(array)/2 to 0 descending:
subset <- subsetSumSolver(array,cand)
if subset != null:
return subset
The above will return the maximal subset that is lower/equals sum(array)/2, and the other part is the complement for the returned subset.
However, the dynamic programming for subset-sum should be enough.
Recall that the formula is:
f(0,i) = true
f(x,0) = false | x != 0
f(x,i) = f(x-arr[i],i-1) OR f(x,i-1)
When building the matrix, the above actually creates you each row with value lower than the initial x, if you input sum(array)/2 - it's basically all values.
After you generate the DP matrix, just find the maximal value of x such that f(x,n)=true, and this is the best partition you can get.
Complexity in this case is O(Wn)