Engineering Top-Down Weight-Balanced Trees

Abstract

Weight-balanced trees are a popular form of self-balancing binary search trees. Their popularity is due to desirable guarantees, for example regarding the required work to balance annotated trees. While usual weight-balanced trees perform their balancing operations in a bottom-up fashion after a modification to the tree is completed, there exists a top-down variant which performs these balancing operations during descend. This variant has so far received only little attention. We provide an in-depth analysis and engineering of these top-down weight-balanced trees, demonstrating their superior performance. We also gaining insights into how the balancing parameters necessary for a weight-balanced tree should be chosen — with the surprising observation that it is often beneficial to choose parameters which are not feasible in the sense of the correctness proofs for the rebalancing algorithm.

Type
Publication
2020 Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX). Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 2020.