A method and system for finding a Kth element in a series of values, including: organizing the series of values in a PDF by counting a number of occurrences of each value of the series of values; organizing the series of values in a CDF that includes adjacent bins of ranges of values, by counting for each bin an accumulated number of occurrences of values of the series of values up to a bin index of that bin; finding in the CDF a bin for which the associated accumulated number of occurrences is a largest accumulated number of occurrences among the accumulated number of occurrences that is smaller than K; and finding the Kth largest element by searching the PDF for the Kth largest element, starting from the found bin index.