The sliding window approach is an efficient iterative technique used for solving problems involving subsequences. Instead of recomputing results for each possible subsequence, the sliding windows approach maintaints a moving window that slides accross the sequence, updating results incrementally. The window is modeled with a pair of indices with a fixed offset that are incremented (or decremented) together, in order to each time process a subsequence of the same length.
This type of approach is useful when dealing with maximum or minimum value in a subarray of fixed length; or whenever we need to solve problems involving contiguous elements of a sequence.
tags: algorithms