The index of an element in A that is supposed to be "close"
to the desired k-th order statistic. This information is used to
choose the pivot so that the chance to fall into the worst case
performance () is minimized and the average case performance
is maximized.
Element in A that is larger than exactly k - 1 other elements of A.
References
Azzini, I., Perrotta, D. and Torti, F. (2023), A practically efficient
fixed-pivot selection algorithm and its extensible MATLAB suite,
"arXiv, stat.ME, eprint 2302.05705"