The tree data structure

Trees
COL 106

Acknowledgement :Many slides are courtesy

Douglas Harder, UWaterloo
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Trees
A rooted tree data structure stores information in nodes
– Similar to linked lists:
• There is a first node, or root
• Each node has variable number of references to successors
(children)
• Each node, other than the root, has exactly one node as its
predecessor (or parent)
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What are trees suitable for ?

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To store hierarchy of people

 The tree data structure

To store organization of departments

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To capture the evolution of languages

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To organize file-systems

Unix file system

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Markup elements in a webpage

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To store phylogenetic data

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This will be our running example. Will illustrate tree

concepts using actual phylogenetic data. 10
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Terminology

All nodes will have zero or more child nodes or children

– I has three children: J, K and L

For all nodes other than the root node, there is one
parent node
– H is the parent of I
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Terminology

The degree of a node is defined as the number of its

children: deg(I) = 3

Nodes with the same parent are siblings

– J, K, and L are siblings
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Terminology
Phylogenetic trees have nodes with degree 2 or 0:
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Terminology

Nodes with degree zero are also called leaf nodes

All other nodes are said to be internal nodes, that is, they
are internal to the tree
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Terminology
Leaf nodes:
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Terminology
Internal nodes:
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Terminology
These trees are equal if the order of the children is
ignored (Unordered trees )

They are different if order is relevant (ordered

trees)
– We will usually examine ordered trees (linear orders)
– In a hierarchical ordering, order is not relevant
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Terminology

The shape of a rooted tree gives a natural

flow from the root node, or just root
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Terminology

A path is a sequence of nodes

(a0, a1, ..., an)
where ak + 1 is a child of ak is

The length of this path is n

E.g., the path (B, E, G)

has length 2
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Terminology
Paths of length 10 (11 nodes) and 4 (5 nodes)

Start of these paths

End of these paths

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Terminology
For each node in a tree, there exists a unique path from
the root node to that node

The length of this path is the depth of the node, e.g.,

– E has depth 2
– L has depth 3
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Terminology
Nodes of depth up to 17
0

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Terminology

The height of a tree is defined as the

maximum depth of any node within the
tree

The height of a tree with one node is 0

– Just the root node

For convenience, we define the height of

the empty tree to be –1
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Terminology
The height of this tree is 17

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Terminology

If a path exists from node a to node b:

– a is an ancestor of b
– b is a descendent of a

Thus, a node is both an ancestor and a

descendant of itself
– We can add the adjective strict to exclude
equality: a is a strict descendent of b if a is a
descendant of b but a ≠ b

The root node is an ancestor of all nodes

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Terminology

The descendants of node B are B, C, D, E, F, and G:

The ancestors of node I are I, H, and A:

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Terminology
All descendants (including itself) of the indicated node
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Terminology
All ancestors (including itself) of the indicated node
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Terminology
Another approach to a tree is to define the tree
recursively:
– A degree-0 node is a tree
– A node with degree n is a tree if it has n children and all
of its children are disjoint trees (i.e., with no intersecting
nodes)

Given any node a within a tree

with root r, the collection of a and
all of its descendants is said to
be a subtree of the tree with
root a
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Example: XHTML

Consider the following XHTML document

<html>
<head>
<title>Hello World!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is a <u>Heading</u></h1>

<p>This is a paragraph with some

<u>underlined</u> text.</p>
</body>
</html>
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Example: XHTML

Consider the following XHTML document

<html> title
<head>
<title>Hello World!</title> heading
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is a <u>Heading</u></h1>

body of page
<p>This is a paragraph with some
<u>underlined</u> text.</p>
</body>
</html>

paragraph
underlining
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Example: XHTML

The nested tags define a tree rooted at the HTML tag

<html>
<head>
<title>Hello World!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is a <u>Heading</u></h1>

<p>This is a paragraph with some

<u>underlined</u> text.</p>
</body>
</html>
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Example: XHTML

Web browsers render this tree as a web page

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Tree ADT
• Data: Nodes in the tree • Query methods:
• Generic methods: • boolean isInternal(p)
• integer size() • boolean isLeaf (p)
• boolean isEmpty() • boolean isRoot(p)
• Accessor methods: • Update methods:
• node root() update methods may be
defined by data structures
• node parent(p)
implementing the Tree ADT
• list<node> children(p) (focus on access methods
for now)

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A Linked Structure for General Trees

• A node is represented by
an object storing
• Element 0
• Parent node
• Sequence of children B
nodes
0 0

A D F

A D F
0 0
C E C E
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A Linked Structure for General Trees

Class Node {
Object element;
Node parent;
List<Node> Children; // or array of Nodes

}
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Tree using Array

• Each node contains a field for data and an array
of pointers to the children for that node
– Missing child will have null pointer
• Tree is represented by pointer to root
• Allows access to ith child in O(1) time
• Very wasteful in space when only few nodes in
tree have many children (most pointers are null)

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Tree using Linked Lists

• Each node contains a field for data and pointer to
a list containing children for that node
– Missing child will have null pointer
• Tree is represented by pointer to root
• Allows access to ith child in O(i) time
• Efficient in terms of space but access takes time

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Tree Traversals
• A traversal visits the nodes of a tree in a
systematic manner

• We will see three types of traversals

• Pre-order
• Post-order
• In-order

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Flavors of (Depth First) Traversal

• In a preorder traversal, a node is visited before
its descendants
• In a postorder traversal, a node is visited after
its descendants
• In an inorder traversal a node is visited after
its left subtree and before its right subtree

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Preorder Traversal
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Process the root

Process the nodes in the all subtrees in their order

Algorithm preOrder(v)
visit(v)
for each child w of v
preOrder(w)

Lecture 5: Trees
 Preorder Traversal
P

M L
S E
R
A A
T E

Preorder traversal: node is visited before its descendants

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Postorder traversal
1. Process the nodes in all subtrees in their order
2. Process the root

Algorithm postOrder(v)
for each child w of v
postOrder(w)
visit(v)

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 Postorder Traversal
P

M L
S E
R
A A
T E

Postorder traversal: node is visited before its descendants

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Inorder traversal
1. Process the nodes in the left subtree
2. Process the root
3. Process the nodes in the right subtree

Algorithm InOrder(v)
InOrder(v->left)
visit(v)
InOrder(v->right)

For simplicity, we consider tree having at most 2

children, though it can be generalized.
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 Inorder Traversal
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M L
S E
R
A A
T E

Inorder traversal: node is visited after its left subtree

and before its right subtree
 Computing Height of Tree
Can be computed using the following idea:
1. The height of a leaf node is 0
2. The height of a node other than the leaf is the
maximum of the height of the left subtree and the
height of the right subtree plus 1.
Height(v) = max[height(vàleft) + height(vàright)] + 1

Details left as exercise.

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 More examples
Which traversal will use if:
1. Want to evaluate the depth of every node ?
2. Given a tree representing arithmetic expression,
print it in postfix notation ?
3. Given the directory structure of files, figure out the
total memory usage at each node?
4. Given the directory structure of files, print the
complete file names for each file ?

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Binary Trees

Every node has degree up to 2.

Proper binary tree: each internal node has
degree exactly 2.
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Binary Tree
• A binary tree is a tree with the • Applications:
following properties: • arithmetic expressions
• Each internal node has two children • decision processes
• The children of a node are an ordered • searching
pair
• We call the children of an internal A
node left child and right child
• Alternative recursive definition: a
binary tree is either B C
• a tree consisting of a single node, or
• a tree whose root has an ordered pair
of children, each of which is a disjoint D E F G
binary tree

H I

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Arithmetic Expression Tree

• Binary tree associated with an arithmetic expression
• internal nodes: operators
• leaves: operands
• Example: arithmetic expression tree for the expression
(2 * (a - 1) + (3 * b))

* *

2 - 3 b

a 1

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How many leaves L does a complete binary tree of
height h have?

The number of leaves at depth d = 2d

If the height of the tree is h it has 2h
leaves.

L = 2h.
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What is the height h of a complete binary tree with
L leaves?
leaves = 1 height = 0

leaves = 2 height = 1

leaves = 4 height = 2

leaves = L height = Log2L

Since L = 2h
log2L = log22h
h = log2L

Data Structures and Algorithms 53

The number of internal nodes of a complete binary
tree of height h is ?

Internal nodes = 0 height = 0

Internal nodes = 1 height = 1

Internal nodes = 1 + 2 height = 2

Internal nodes = 1 + 2 + 4 height = 3

1 + 2 + 22 + . . . + 2 h-1 = 2h -1 Geometric series

Thus, a complete binary tree of height = h has 2h-1 internal

nodes.

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 The number of nodes n of a complete
binary tree of height h is ?

nodes = 1 height = 0

nodes = 3 height = 1

nodes = 7 height = 2

nodes = 2h+1- 1 height = h

Since L = 2h
and since the number of internal nodes = 2h-1 the
total number of nodes n = 2h+ 2h-1 = 2(2h) – 1 = 2h+1- 1.

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If the number of nodes is n then what is the
height?

nodes = 1 height = 0

nodes = 3 height = 1

nodes = 7 height = 2

nodes = n height = Log2(n+1) - 1

Since n = 2h+1-1
n + 1 = 2h+1
Log2(n+1) = Log2 2h+1
Log2(n+1) = h+1
h = Log2(n+1) - 1
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What if the tree is not complete (but proper) ?

Height could lie in the range [log n, n/2]

Number of leaves = Number of internal nodes + 1

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 BinaryTree ADT

• The BinaryTree ADT • Update methods may

extends the Tree ADT, be defined by data
i.e., it inherits all the structures
methods of the Tree implementing the
ADT BinaryTree ADT
• Additional methods:
• node leftChild(p)
• node rightChild(p)
• node sibling(p)

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