Nth Largest in Array | Dataford Interview Questions

A First Republic risk-monitoring workflow receives an unsorted array of integer scores. Return the kth largest score, counting duplicate values as separate positions.

Use a data structure that avoids sorting the entire array when k is relatively small.

Formal Specification

Implement kth_largest(nums, k).

Input: nums, a non-empty array of integers, and k, a positive integer.
Output: The integer that would appear at index k - 1 after sorting nums in descending order.
Duplicate values count independently. The input is guaranteed to contain at least k elements.

Constraints

1 <= k <= nums.length
1 <= nums.length <= 100000
-10^9 <= nums[i] <= 10^9
Duplicate values are allowed
The input always contains at least k elements

Function Signature

def kth_largest(nums, k):

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