An analytic approach to the height of binary search trees II

  • Authors:
  • Michael Drmota

  • Affiliations:
  • TU Wien, Wien, Austria

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the ACM (JACM)
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

It is shown that all centralized absolute moments E|Hn − EHn|α (α ≥ 0) of the height Hn of binary search trees of size n and of the saturation level Hn′ are bounded. The methods used rely on the analysis of a retarded differential equation of the form Φ′(u) = −α−2Φ(u/α)2 with α 1. The method can also be extended to prove the same result for the height of m-ary search trees. Finally the limiting behaviour of the distribution of the height of binary search trees is precisely determined.