sotiristherobot / artists-pairs

Artists-Pairs

Coding Challenge

The attached text file "Artist_lists_small.txt" contains the favorite musical artists of 1000 users from LastFM. Each line is a list of up to 50 artists, formatted as follows:

Radiohead,Pulp,Morrissey,Delays,Stereophonics,Blur,Suede,Sleeper,The La's,Super Furry Animals\n Band of Horses,Iggy Pop,The Velvet Underground,Radiohead,The Decemberists,Morrissey,Television\n etc.

Write a program that, using this file as input, produces an output file containing a list of pairs of artists which appear TOGETHER in at least fifty different lists. For example, in the above sample, Radiohead and Morrissey appear together twice, but every other pair appears only once.

Your solution cannot store a list of all possible pairs of bands (don't use a 'brute force' approach). Your solution MAY return a best guess, i.e. lists which appear at least 50 times with high probability, as long as you explain why this tradeoff improves the performance of the algorithm. Please include, either in comments or in a separate file, a brief one-paragraph description of any optimizations you made and how they impact the run-time of the algorithm.

Your solution should preferably be implemented Java or PHP. Other languages may be considered on a case-by-case basis.