Randomized binary search trees

  • Authors:
  • Conrado Martínez;Salvador Roura

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. Politécnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain;Univ. Politécnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the ACM (JACM)
  • Year:
  • 1998

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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.