Problem-Solving Guide: Predicting the Algorithm Tags and Difficulty for Competitive Programming Problems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a large-scale dataset and a deep learning model for predicting algorithm tags and difficulty levels of competitive programming problems, aiding engineers and developers in problem-solving and time estimation.

Contribution

It presents the first large-scale dataset for algorithm tag prediction and the novel task of difficulty level prediction, along with a deep learning approach for simultaneous prediction.

Findings

The dataset is the largest for algorithm tag prediction to date.

The proposed model effectively predicts both tags and difficulty levels.

Results demonstrate high accuracy in multi-task prediction tasks.

Abstract

The recent program development industries have required problem-solving abilities for engineers, especially application developers. However, AI-based education systems to help solve computer algorithm problems have not yet attracted attention, while most big tech companies require the ability to solve algorithm problems including Google, Meta, and Amazon. The most useful guide to solving algorithm problems might be guessing the category (tag) of the facing problems. Therefore, our study addresses the task of predicting the algorithm tag as a useful tool for engineers and developers. Moreover, we also consider predicting the difficulty levels of algorithm problems, which can be used as useful guidance to calculate the required time to solve that problem. In this paper, we present a real-world algorithm problem multi-task dataset, AMT, by mainly collecting problem samples from the most famous and large competitive programming website Codeforces. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed dataset is the most large-scale dataset for predicting algorithm tags compared to previous studies. Moreover, our work is the first to address predicting the difficulty levels of algorithm problems. We present a deep learning-based novel method for simultaneously predicting algorithm tags and the difficulty levels of an algorithm problem given. All datasets and source codes are available at https://github.com/sronger/PSG_Predicting_Algorithm_Tags_and_Difficulty.