Binary Trees

Notes

Goodrich Chapter 8 Trees

Trees - most important nonlinear data structures in computing

Relationships in trees are hierarchical

Each element in a tree has a parent element and zero or more child elements

Formally, define tree T as a set of nodes storing elements such that the nodes have a parent-child relationship satisfying the following properties:

• If T is non-empty, it has a special node, called the root of T, that has no parent.
• Each node v of T different from the root has a unique parent node w; every node with parent w is a child of w.

Node relationships:

• Sibling nodes are nodes that share a parent
• External nodes are nodes with no children - total number is n_E
• Internal nodes are nodes with 1 or more children - total number is n_I
• Node u is an ancestor of node v is u = v or if u is an ancestor of the parent of v.
• The stubtree of T that is rooted at node v is the tree consisting of all descendants of v in T - including v itself.

Edges and paths:

• An edge of three T is a pair of nodes (u,v) such that u is the parent of v or vice-versa
• A path is a set of consecutive edges - or, a set of consecutive nodes connected by edges.
• A tree is ordered if there is a meaningful linear order among the children of each node.

Example:

• Documents like books are hierarchically organized as a tree whose internal nodes are parts, chapters, sections, and leaves are paragraphs, tables, figures

Ordered vs unordered

• Ordered tree - the order of the sibling nodes is important
• Unordered tree - there is no precedence with respect to one sibling or the other
• Examples of ordered trees occur when there are ordered operations (e.g., siblings ordered according to order of birth)
• Examples of unrodered trees occur with enumerations or functionality (org charts, divisions in a company)

Tree abstract data types:

• Things get a bit confusing from here. Goodrich separates the concept of a "Position" from the concept of a "Node."
• The Position is a location in the tree, the Node is a four-pointer container. k

Abstract class:

• Tree is an example of an abstract class implementation
• In Python, each virtual function will raise a NotImplementedError("Must be implemented by subclass")
• In Python, errors in arguments pointing to invalid positions should raise a ValueError
• In Java, we define the functions to be abstract and require that inheriting objects define them. Java/Abstract Classes

Skiena Chapter 3 Data Structures

Question 3-5

Question 3-5) Find the overhead fraction (data space/total space) for each binary tree implementation on n nodes given the following conditions:

• All nodes store data, 2 child pointers, and 1 parent pointer. Data fields are 4 bytes, pointers are 4 bytes.
• Only leaf nodes store data; internal nodes store 2 child pointers. Data field requires 4 bytes, 2 bytes per pointer.

First case:

• Binary tree with n nodes -> n-1 edges
• Child/parent ppointers means 2x edges
• 2(n-1) edges, 2(n-1) pointers
• Alternatively, here's the analysis:

n nodes x (4 bytes of data/node) = 4n bytes data

n nodes x (12 bytes of pointers/node) = 12 n bytes

Total space is 16 n bytes, so overhead fraction is 1/4, i.e., the data space to total space ratio is 1/4

Second case:

• If we have n nodes, we have ~n/2 leaves
• n nodes total x (1 leaf node / 2 nodes) ~ n/2 lleaf nodes

n/2 empty nodes x (2 pointers/1 empty node) x (2 bytes/pointer) = 2n bytes for empty nodes with pointers

n/2 data nodes x (4 bytes/1 empty node) = 2n bytes data

The overhead fraction is thus 1/2: half the bytes are for data, half the bytes are for pointers.

Question 3-6

Question 3-6) Describe how to modify any balanced tree structure such that search, insert, delete, min, max each take the expected amount of time, O(log n), but sucessor and predecessor methods now take O(1) time each. What modifications are required, and to which methods?

The methods:

• Predecessor(D,k) - returns the predecessor key (in order) to the given key k
• Successor(D,k) - returns the successor key to the given key k

Question is, how to we implement neighbor lookup in O(1) time in a balanced tree?

Two options:

• Option one - add a previous and next node pointers. This increases the complexity of the bookkeeping, and of the add/insert/remove methods, which now have to traverse the tree to fix their links.
• Option two - make a data tree that is twice as big, and only holds data in the bottom-most leaf nodes. This obviates the need for a next and previous pointer, because the tree is easy to navigate - up and over... at most log(n) operations to traverse tree.

Option one:

We would need to modify the add() and insert() method, the delete method, no need to modify search or min or max methods.

We modify them to keep track of the previous node. Finding the previous node would be somewhat tricky logic. When we add a new node, find its next and previous nodes, and link them correctly.

Option two:

It would be algorithmically easier (but more expensive and more complicated implementation wise) to use a tree structure with only data in the leaf nodes. Finding/keeping track of next or previous node then doesn't require the extra two pointers and the extra logic of traversing a binary tree, it just requires twice the number of nodes (tree of size N has N/2 leaf nodes).

This also requires implementation of the entire data structure again, and it is not so obvious how you keep a tree structure like that balanced and dynamically resized.