Counting inversions in an array

Question

I\'m designing an algorithm to do the following: Given array A[1... n], for every i < j, find all inversion pairs such that A[i] > A[j]

Answer 1

I wonder why nobody mentioned binary-indexed trees yet. You can use one to maintain prefix sums on the values of your permutation elements. Then you can just proceed from right to left and count for every element the number of elements smaller than it to the right:

def count_inversions(a):
  res = 0
  counts = [0]*(len(a)+1)
  rank = { v : i+1 for i, v in enumerate(sorted(a)) }
  for x in reversed(a):
    i = rank[x] - 1
    while i:
      res += counts[i]
      i -= i & -i
    i = rank[x]
    while i <= len(a):
      counts[i] += 1
      i += i & -i
  return res

The complexity is O(n log n), and the constant factor is very low.