Restructuring ordered binary trees

  • Authors:
  • William Evans;David Kirkpatrick

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC, Canada, V6T 1Z4;Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC, Canada, V6T 1Z4

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Algorithms - Special issue: SODA 2000
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

We consider the problem of restructuring an ordered binary tree T, preserving the in-order sequence of its nodes, so as to reduce its height to some target value h. Such a restructuring necessarily involves the downward displacement of some of the nodes of T. Our results, focusing both on the maximum displacement over all nodes and on the maximum displacement over leaves only, provide (i) an explicit tradeoff between the worst-case displacement and the height restriction (including a family of trees that exhibit the worst-case displacements) and (ii) efficient algorithms to achieve height-restricted restructuring while minimizing the maximum node displacement.