Sliding Window Maximum | Dataford Interview Questions

HPE Ezmeral telemetry processing may need the peak value in each consecutive window of a large numeric stream. Given an integer array and a fixed window size, return the maximum value from every window as it moves one position at a time.

Formal Specification

Implement max_sliding_window(nums, k).

Input: nums, a non-empty list of integers, and k, an integer window size.
Output: a list of integers where the element at index i is the maximum of nums[i:i+k].
Windows must be processed from left to right, and each adjacent window overlaps the previous one by k - 1 elements.

The solution should avoid rescanning all k elements for every window because the array may be very large.

Constraints

1 <= len(nums) <= 10^6
1 <= k <= len(nums)
-10^9 <= nums[i] <= 10^9
The output contains len(nums) - k + 1 values

Function Signature

def max_sliding_window(nums, k):

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