Dr Pooja Singh

Associate Professor
Galgotias University, Greater Noida

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Topics
• Types of Data Structures
• Examples for each type
• Tree Data Structure
• Basic Terminology
• Tree ADT
• Traversal Algorithms
• Binary Trees
• Binary Tree Representations
• Binary Tree ADT
• Binary Tree Traversals

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Types of Data Structure

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 Linear Data Structures
• In linear data structure, member elements form a sequence. Such linear
structures can be represented in memory by using one of the two basic
strategies
• By having the linear relationship between the elements represented by
means of sequential memory locations. These linear structures are called
arrays. By having relationship between the elements represented by
pointers. These structures are called linked lists.

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 When to use them

• Arrays are useful when number of elements to be stored is fixed.

• Operations like traversal searching and sorting can easily be performed
on arrays.
• On the other hand, linked lists are useful when the number of data items
in the collection are likely to change.

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Nonlinear Data Structures

• In nonlinear data structures, data elements are not organized in a

sequential fashion. A data item in a nonlinear data structure could be
attached to several other data elements to reflect a special
relationship among them and all the data items cannot be traversed
in a single run.
• Data structures like multidimensional arrays, trees and graphs are
some examples of widely used nonlinear data structures.

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 Examples
• A Multidimensional Array is simply a collection of one-dimensional arrays.
• A Tree is a data structure that is made up of a set of linked nodes, which can
be used to represent a hierarchical relationship among data elements.
• A Graph is a data structure that is made up of a finite set of edges and
vertices. Edges represent connections or relationships among vertices that
stores data elements.

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 Difference
• Main difference between linear and nonlinear data structures lie in the way
they organize data elements.
• In linear data structures, data elements are organized sequentially and
therefore they are easy to implement in the computer’s memory.
• In nonlinear data structures, a data element can be attached to several
other data elements to represent specific relationships that exist among
them.

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 Difficult to Implement

• Due to this nonlinear structure, they might be difficult to implement in

computer’s linear memory compared to implementing linear data
structures.
• Selecting one data structure type over the other should be done carefully by
considering the relationship among the data elements that needs to be
stored.

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 A Specific Example

• Imagine that you are hired by company XYZ to organize all of their records
into a computer database.
• The first thing you are asked to do is create a database of names with all the
company's management and employees.
• To start your work, you make a list of everyone in the company along with
their position and other details.

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Employees Table

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Disadvantages of Tables

• But this list only shows one view of the company. You also want your
database to represent the relationships between management and
employees at XYZ.
• Although your list contains both name and position, it does not tell
you which managers are responsible for which workers and so on.
• After thinking about the problem for a while, you decide that a tree
diagram is a much better structure for showing the work
relationships at XYZ.

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Better Representation

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 Comparison
• These two diagrams are examples of different data structures.
• In one of the data structures, your data is organized into a list. This is very
useful for keeping the names of the employees in alphabetical order so that
we can locate the employee's record very quickly.
• However, this structure is not very useful for showing the relationships
between employees. A tree structure is much better suited for this purpose.

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 Tree Data Structure
• A Tree is a nonlinear data structure that models a hierarchical
organization.
• The characteristic features are that each element may have several
successors (called its “children”) and every element except one (called
the “root”) has a unique predecessor (called its “parent”).
• Trees are common in computer science: Computer file systems are trees,
the inheritance structure for C++/Java classes is a tree.

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What is a Tree ?

• In Computer Science, a tree is an abstract model of a hierarchical

structure
• A tree consists of nodes with a parent-child relation
• Applications:
• Organization Charts
• File Systems
• Programming Environment

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 Tree Definition
• Here is the recursive definition of an (unordered) tree:
• A tree is a pair (r, S), where r is a node and S is a set of disjoint trees, none of which
contains r.
• The node r is called the root of the tree T, and the elements of the set S
are called its subtrees.
• The set S, of course, may be empty.
• The elements of a tree are called its nodes.

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 Root, Parent and Children

• If T = (x, S) is a tree, then

• x is the root of T and
• S is its set of subtrees S = {T1, T2, T3, . . ., Tn}.

• Each subtree Tj is itself a tree with its own root rj .

• In this case, we call the node r the parent of each node rj, and we call the rj
the children of r. In general.

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Basic Terminology
• A node with no children is called a leaf. A node with at least one
child is called an internal node.
• The Node having further sub-branches is called parent node.
• Every node c other than the root is connected by an edge to some
one other node p called the parent of c.
• We also call c a child of p.

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An Example

• n1 is the parent of n2 ,n3 and n4,

while n2 is the parent of n5 and
n6. Said another way, n2, n3, and
n4 are children of n1, while n5
and n6 are children of n2.

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 Connected Tree

• A tree is connected in the sense that if we start at any node n other than the
root, move to the parent of n, to the parent of the parent of n, and so on,
we eventually reach the root of the tree.
• For instance, starting at n7, we move to its parent, n4, and from there to n4’s
parent, which is the root, n1.

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Ancestors and Descendants
• The parent-child relationship can be extended naturally to ancestors
and descendants.
• Informally, the ancestors of a node are found by following the unique
path from the node to its parent, to its parent’s parent, and so on.
• The descendant relationship is the inverse of the ancestor relationship,
just as the parent and child relationships are inverses of each other.

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 Path and Path Length

• More formally, suppose m1,m2, . . . ,mk is a sequence of nodes in a tree such

that m1 is the parent of m2, which is the parent of m3, and so on, down to
mk−1, which is the parent of mk. Then m1,m2, . . . ,mk is called a path from m1
to mk in the tree. The path length or length of the path is k −1, one less than
the number of nodes on the path.

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 In our Example

• n1, n2, n6 is a path of length 2 from the root n1 to the node n6.

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 Height and Depth

• In a tree, the height of a node n is the length of a longest path from n to a

leaf. The height of the tree is the height of the root.
• The depth, or level, of a node n is the length of the path from the root to n.

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In our Example

• node n1 has height 2, n2 has height 1, and leaf n3 has height 0.

In fact, any leaf has height 0. The height of the tree is 2. The
depth of n1 is 0, the depth of n2 is 1, and the depth of n5 is 2.

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 Other Terms

• The size of a tree is the number of nodes it contains.

• The total number of subtrees attached to that node is called the degree of
the node.
• Degree of the Tree is nothing but the maximum degree in the tree.
• The nodes with common parent are called siblings or brothers.

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Degree

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Degree of the Tree

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Siblings

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Terminology Explained

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Another Example

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Subtrees

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Binary Tree

• A binary tree is a tree in which no node can have more than two subtrees. In
other words, a node can have zero, one or two subtrees.

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 Tree ADT

• The tree ADT stores elements at positions, which are defined relative to
neighboring positions.
• Positions in a tree are its nodes, and the neighboring positions satisfy
the parent-child relationships that define a valid tree.
• Tree nodes may store arbitrary objects.

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Methods of a Tree ADT
• As with a list position, a position object for a tree supports the
method: element() : that returns the object stored at this position
(or node).
• The tree ADT supports four types of methods:
• Accessor Methods
• Generic Methods
• Query Methods
• Update Methods

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Accessor Methods
• We use positions to abstract nodes. The real power of node positions in a
tree comes from the accessor methods of the tree ADT that return and
accept positions, such as the following:
• root(): Return the position of the tree’s root; an error occurs if the tree is empty.
• parent(p): Return the position of the parent of p; an error occurs if p is the root.
• children(p): Return an iterable collection containing the children of node p.
• Iterable - you can step through (i.e. iterate) the object as a collection

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 Make a note of it

• If a tree T is ordered, then the iterable collection, children(p), stores the

children of p in their linear order.
• If p is an external node, then children(p) is empty.
• Any method that takes a position as argument should generate an error
condition if that position is invalid.

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 Generic Methods

• Tree ADT also supports the following Generic Methods:

• size(): Return the number of nodes in the tree.
• isEmpty(): Test whether the tree has any nodes or not.
• Iterator(): Return an iterator of all the elements stored at nodes of the tree.
• positions(): Return an iterable collection of all the nodes of the tree.

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Query Methods
• In addition to the above fundamental accessor methods, the tree ADT also
supports the following Boolean query methods:
• isInternal(p): Test whether node p is an internal node
• isExternal(p): Test whether node p is an external node
• isRoot(p): Test whether node p is the root node
(These methods make programming with tree easier and more readable,
since we can use them in the conditionals of if -statements and while -loops,
rather than using a non-intuitive conditional).

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 Update Methods

• The tree ADT also supports the following update method:

• replace(p, e): Replace with e and return the element stored at node p.

(Additional update methods may be defined by data structures implementing the

tree ADT)

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 Tree ADT Exceptions
• An interface for the tree ADT uses the following exceptions to indicate error
conditions:
• InvalidPositionException: This error condition may be thrown by any method taking a
position as an argument to indicate that the position is invalid.
• BoundaryViolationException: This error condition may be thrown by method parent()
if it’s called on the root.
• EmptyTreeException: This error condition may be thrown by method root() if it’s
called on an empty tree.

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 Traversal Algorithms
• A traversal (circumnavigation) algorithm is a method for processing a data
structure that applies a given operation to each element of the structure.
• For example, if the operation is to print the contents of the element, then
the traversal would print every element in the structure.
• The process of applying the operation to an element is called visiting the
element. So executing the traversal algorithm causes each element in the
structure to be visited.

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Level Order Traversal

• The level order traversal algorithm visits the root, then visits each
element on the first level, then visits each element on the second
level, and so forth, each time visiting all the elements on one level
before going down to the next level.
• If the tree is drawn in the usual manner with its root at the top and
leaves near the bottom, then the level order pattern is the same left-
to-right top-to-bottom pattern that you follow to read English text.

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Level Order Example

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Level order Traversal - Algorithm

• To traverse a nonempty ordered tree:

1. Initialize a queue.
2. Enqueue the root.
3. Repeat steps 4–6 until the queue is empty.
4. Dequeue node x from the queue.
5. Visit x.
6. Enqueue all the children of x in order.

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Preorder Traversal

The preorder traversal of the tree shown above would visit

the nodes in this order: a, b, e, h, i, f, c, d, g, j, k, l, m.
Note that the preorder traversal of a tree can be obtained
by circumnavigating the tree, beginning at the root and
visiting each node the first time it is encountered on the
left.
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 Preorder Traversal - Algorithm

• To traverse a nonempty ordered tree:

1. Visit the root.
2. Do a recursive preorder traversal of each subtree in order.
• The postorder traversal algorithm does a postorder traversal recursively to
each subtree before visiting the root.

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 Binary Trees

• A binary tree is either the empty set or a triple T = (x, L, R), where x is a node
and L and R are disjoint binary trees, neither of which contains x.
• The node x is called the root of the tree T, and the subtrees L and R are
called the left subtree and the right subtree of T rooted at x.

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Binary Tree

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 Terminologies

• The definitions of the terms size, path, length of a path, depth of a node,
level, height, interior node, ancestor, descendant, and subtree are the same
for binary trees as for general trees.

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Trees and Binary Trees - Difference

• It is important to understand that while binary trees require us to

distinguish whether a child is either a left child or a right child,
ordinary trees require no such distinction.
• There is another technical difference. While trees are defined to have
at least one node, it is convenient to include the empty tree, the tree
Empty tree with no nodes, among the binary trees.

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 Difference Continued

• That is, binary trees are not just trees all of whose nodes have two or fewer
children.
• Not only are the two trees in the above Figure are different from each other,
but they have no relation to the ordinary tree consisting of a root and a single
child of the root:

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Five binary trees with three nodes

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 Full and Complete Binary Trees

• A binary tree is said to be full if all its leaves are at the same level and every
interior node has two children.
• A complete binary tree is either a full binary tree or one that is full except
for a segment of missing leaves on the right side of the bottom level.

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Full and Complete Binary Trees

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Full Binary Tree

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Complete Binary Tree

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 Full Binary Trees

• The full binary tree of height h has l = 2h leaves and m = 2h – 1 internal

nodes.
• The full binary tree of height h has a total of n = 2h+1 – 1 nodes.
• The full binary tree with n nodes has height h = lg(n+1) – 1.

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 Complete Binary Tree

• In a complete binary tree of height h,

h + 1 ≤ n ≤ 2h+1 – 1 and h =
└ lg n ┘

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 Make a Note
• Complete binary trees are important because they have a simple and natural
implementation using ordinary arrays.
• The natural mapping is actually defined for any binary tree: Assign the
number 1 to the root; for any node, if i is its number, then assign 2i to its left
child and 2i+1 to its right child (if they exist).
• This assigns a unique positive integer to each node. Then simply store the
element at node i in a[i], where a[] is an array.

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 Binary Tree Representations
• If a complete binary tree with n nodes (depth = log n + 1) is represented
sequentially, then for any node with index i, 1 ≤ i ≤ n, we have:
• parent(i) is at i/2 if i!=1. If i=1, i is at the root and has no parent.
• leftChild(i) is at 2i if 2i ≤ n. If 2i > n, then i has noleft child.
• rightChild(i) is at 2i+1 if 2i +1 ≤ n. If 2i +1 >n,
then i has no right child.

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Array Implementation

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 The Disadvantage

• Figure above shows the incomplete binary tree and the natural mapping of its
nodes into an array which leaves some gaps.

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Linked List Implementation
typedef struct tnode *ptnode;
typedef struct tnode
{
int data;
ptnode left, right;
};

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Linked List Implementation

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Include One more Pointer

 A natural way to implement a tree T is to use a linked

structure, where we represent each node p of T by a
position object with the following fields:
 A link to the parent of p, A link to the LeftChild named Left, a
link to the RightChild named Right and the Data.

Parent

Data

Left Right

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Array Implementation

• Advantages
• Direct Access
• Finding the Parent / Children is fast
• Disadvantages
• Wastage of memory
• Insertion and Deletion will be costlier
• Array size and depth

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Linked List Implementation

• Advantages
• No wastage of memory
• Insertion and Deletion will be easy
• Disadvantages
• Does not provide direct access
• Additional space in each node.

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 Binary Tree ADT
• The Binary Tree ADT extends the Tree ADT, i.e., it inherits all the methods of
the Tree ADT, in addition to that it supports the following additional
accessor methods:
• position left(p): return the left child of p, an error condition occurs if p has no left
child.
• position right(p): return the right child of p, an error condition occurs if p has no right
child.
• boolean hasLeft(p): test whether p has a left child
• boolean hasRight(p): test whether p has a right child

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 Binary Tree ADT (Cont.)

• Update methods may be defined by data structures implementing the

Binary Tree ADT.
• Since Binary trees are ordered trees, the iterable collection returned by
method chilrden(p) (inherited from the Tree ADT), stores the left child of p
before the right child of p.

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Binary Tree Traversals

• The three traversal algorithms that are used for general trees (see Chapter
10) apply to binary trees as well: the preorder traversal, the postorder
traversal, and the level order traversal.
• In addition, binary trees support a fourth traversal algorithm: the inorder
traversal. These four traversal algorithms are given next.

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 Level Order Traversal
• To traverse a nonempty binary tree:

1. Initialize a queue.
2. Enqueue the root.
3. Repeat steps 4–7 until the queue is empty.
4. Dequeue a node x from the queue.
5. Visit x.
6. Enqueue the left child of x if it exists.
7. Enqueue the right child of x if it exists.

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Level Order

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 Preorder Traversal

• To traverse a nonempty binary tree:

1. Visit the root.

2. If the left subtree is nonempty, do a preorder traversal on it.
3. If the right subtree is nonempty, do a preorder traversal on it.

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Preorder

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Postorder Traversal

• To traverse a nonempty binary tree:

1. If the left subtree is nonempty, do a postorder traversal on it.

2. If the right subtree is nonempty, do a postorder traversal on it.
3. Visit the root.

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Postorder

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Inorder Traversal

• To traverse a nonempty binary tree:

1. If the left subtree is nonempty, do a preorder traversal on it.

2. Visit the root.
3. If the right subtree is nonempty, do a preorder traversal on it.

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Inorder

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 Traversal Using Flag
• The order in which the nodes are visited during a tree traversal can
be easily determined by imagining there is a “flag” attached to
each node, as follows:
• To traverse the tree, collect the flags:

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Inorder and Postorder

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Interaction

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