1998Journal of the ACMOpen access

Randomized binary search trees

Conrado Martı́nez, Salvador Roura

Open full text 87 citations

Abstract

In this paper, we present randomized algorithms over binary search trees such that: (a) the insertion of a set of keys, in any fixed order, into an initially empty tree always produces a random binary search tree; (b) the deletion of any key from a random binary search tree results in a random binary search tree; (c) the random choices made by the algorithms are based upon the sizes of the subtrees of the tree; this implies that we can support accesses by rank without additional storage requirements or modification of the data structures; and (d) the cost of any elementary operation, measured as the number of visited nodes, is the same as the expected cost of its standard deterministic counterpart; hence, all search and update operations have guaranteed expected cost O(log n ), but now irrespective of any assumption on the input distribution.

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What this paper is about

In this paper, we present randomized algorithms over binary search trees such that: (a) the insertion of a set of keys, in any fixed order, into an initially empty tree always produces a random binary search tree; (b) the deletion of any key from a random binary search tree results in a random binary search tree; (c) the random choices made by the algorithms are based upon the sizes of the subtrees of the tree; this implies that we can support accesses by rank without additional storage requirements or modification of the data structures; and (d) the cost of any elementary operation, measured as the number of visited nodes, is the same as the expected cost of its standard deterministic counterpart; hence, all search and update operations have guaranteed expected cost O(log n ), but now irrespective of any assumption on the input distribution.

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Available abstract

In this paper, we present randomized algorithms over binary search trees such that: (a) the insertion of a set of keys, in any fixed order, into an initially empty tree always produces a random binary search tree; (b) the deletion of any key from a random binary search tree results in a random binary search tree; (c) the random choices made by the algorithms are based upon the sizes of the subtrees of the tree; this implies that we can support accesses by rank without additional storage requirements or modification of the data structures; and (d) the cost of any elementary operation, measured as the number of visited nodes, is the same as the expected cost of its standard deterministic counterpart; hence, all search and update operations have guaranteed expected cost O(log n ), but now irrespective of any assumption on the input distribution.

Key concepts: Binary search tree, Random binary tree, Optimal binary search tree, Self-balancing binary search tree, Interval tree, Binary tree, Search tree, K-ary tree

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