Data Structure and Algorithm Design

Sections

• General Tree Concepts

• Binary Search Trees

Tree Data Structure

Outline

• Definitions

• Tree Concepts

• Applications

• Operations

• Implementation variations

• Binary tree

Definitions

• In graph theory, a tree is a connected and acyclic undirected graph.

  • focus on connectivity and acyclicity

• In computer science, a tree is a hierarchical data structure composed of nodes connected by edges, where each node has a parent (except for the root node) and zero or more children.

  • focus on hierarchy and parent-child relationship

  • Recursive definition: root and subtrees, each of which is also a tree

  

Tree Concepts

Other Concepts

• Degree of a node or a tree

• Depth

• Ancestor and descendant

• Path

• Distance

• Ordered Unordered

Applications

• File system (directory, sub-directory, and file)

• Decision making (decision tree)

• Indexing (binary search tree, B-tree)

• Parsing tree

• Heap (complete binary tree)

• Blockchain (Merkle tree)

• Search-based Artificial Intelligence (game tree)

Operations

• Search

• Insertion

• Deletion

• Traversal

  • Breadth-first traversal

  • Depth-first traversal

    • Pre-order traversal

    • Post-order traversal

• Height

• Degree

Implementation Variations

• Each node stores a variable-length list of references to child nodes

• Each node stores a reference to its first child and a reference to its next sibling

• Each node stores a reference to its parent

Binary Tree

Only concepts and operations that are different from general trees are covered.

• Definition: Degree 2 ordered tree.

• Concepts:

  • Left child and right child

• Operations:

  • In-order traversal

• Variations:

  • Full binary tree

  • Complete binary tree

  • Perfect binary tree

Credit: https://dev.to/elmarshall/binary-search-trees-part-i-4p05

• Applications:

  • Binary search tree

  • Expression parsing

  • Decision tree

  • Heap

  • Huffman coding

Binary Search Tree

Outline

• Definition

• Behaviors

• Implementation

• Drawbacks

• Applications

Definition and Behaviors

Definition A binary search tree (BST) is a binary tree, in which for every node, its left child has a smaller or equal key than itself while its right child has a greater or equal key than itself.

Behaviors

• Insertion

• Deletion

• Search

• Traversal

  • In-order traversal: left subtree, root, right subtree

    • Ascending ordered output

Implementation

• Algorithms that happens from top to bottom

  Easy to implement either iteratively or recursively

  • search

  • insert

• Algorithms that happens from bottom to top

  Easy to implement recursively; Hard to implement iteratively (must use stack)

  • subtree removal (may be used in the destruction of a tree)

  • find min node or find max node (part of remove)

  • in-order traversal

  • pre-order traversal

Implementation (cont’d)

• Search

  • if equal, found

  • if smaller, search left subtree

  • if greater, search right subtree

• Insertion

  • if equal, do nothing

  • if smaller, insert to left subtree

    • if left is empty, insert

  • if greater, insert to right subtree

    • if right is empty, insert

• Removal

  • remove leaf node: simply remove it

  • remove node with one child: replace the node with its child

  • remove node with two children

    • find the min node in the right subtree (successor)

    • replace the node to be removed with the min node

    • remove the min node (min node has at most one child)

Drawbacks of naive BST

• Algorithm efficiency depends on the average height of the BST

• BST may degrade a very unbalanced form or even to a linked list

• Solution 1: randomize the order of insertion

• Solution 2: add balancing mechanism

  • Self-balancing

  • External balancing

• Solution 3: move the most recently accessed node toward the root

  • Only optimize the search performance for a specific access pattern

  • No guarantee for the worst case

  • Splay tree

Applications

• Indexing: store a set of references to records in a BST and use the key as the search key.

• Tree Sort: sort a sequence of elements by building a BST and then traversing it in-order.

• Tree Map: store a set of (key, value) pairs in a BST and use the key as the search key.

• Tree Set: store a set of elements in a BST and use the element as the search key.