Tree Traversal

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From the course by University of California San Diego

Data Structures

1465 ratings

University of California San Diego

Data Structures

1465 ratings

Course 2 of 6 in the Specialization Data Structures and Algorithms

A good algorithm usually comes together with a set of good data structures that allow the algorithm to manipulate the data efficiently. In this course, we consider the common data structures that are used in various computational problems. You will learn how these data structures are implemented in different programming languages and will practice implementing them in our programming assignments. This will help you to understand what is going on inside a particular built-in implementation of a data structure and what to expect from it. You will also learn typical use cases for these data structures. A few examples of questions that we are going to cover in this class are the following: 1. What is a good strategy of resizing a dynamic array? 2. How priority queues are implemented in C++, Java, and Python? 3. How to implement a hash table so that the amortized running time of all operations is O(1) on average? 4. What are good strategies to keep a binary tree balanced? You will also learn how services like Dropbox manage to upload some large files instantly and to save a lot of storage space!

From the lesson

Basic Data Structures

In this module, you will learn about the basic data structures used throughout the rest of this course. We start this module by looking in detail at the fundamental building blocks: arrays and linked lists. From there, we build up two important data structures: stacks and queues. Next, we look at trees: examples of how they’re used in Computer Science, how they’re implemented, and the various ways they can be traversed. Once you’ve completed this module, you will be able to implement any of these data structures, as well as have a solid understanding of the costs of the operations, as well as the tradeoffs involved in using each data structure.

Tree Traversal10:25

Meet the Instructors

Alexander S. Kulikov
Visiting Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Michael Levin
Lecturer
Computer Science
Daniel M Kane
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering / Department of Mathematics
Neil Rhodes
Adjunct Faculty
Computer Science and Engineering

In this video, we're going to continue talking about trees.

And in particular, look at walking a tree, or visiting the elements of a tree,

or traversing the elements of a tree.

So often we want to go through the nodes of a tree in a particular order.

We talked earlier, when we were looking at the syntax tree of an expression,

how we could evaluate the expression by working our way up from the leaves.

So that would be one way of walking through a tree in a particular order so

we could evaluate.

Another example might be printing the nodes of a tree.

If we had a binary search tree,

we might want to get the elements of a tree in sorted order.

There are two main ways to traverse a tree.

One, is depth-first.

So there,

we completely traverse one sub-tree before we go on to a sibling sub-tree.

Alternatively, in breadth-first search we traverse all the nodes at one level before

we go to the next level.

So in that case, we would traverse all of our siblings before

we visited any of the children of any of the siblings.

We'll see some code examples of these.

In depth-first search, so we're going to look here at an in-order traversal.

And that's really defined best for a binary tree.

This is InOrderTraversal is what we might use to print

all the nodes of a binary search tree in alphabetical order.

So, we're going to have a recursive implementation,

where if we have a nil tree, we do nothing, otherwise,

we traverse the left sub-tree, and then do whatever we're going to do with the key,

visit it, in this case, we're going to print it.

But often there's just some operation you want to carry out, and

then traverse the right sub-tree.

So let's look at an example of this.

We've got our binary search tree.

And we're going to look at how these nodes get printed out if we do

an in-order traversal.

So to begin with, we go to the Les node.

And from there, since it's not nil,

we're going to do an in-order traversal of its left child, which is Cathy.

Similarly now we're going to do an in-order traversal of its left child,

which is Alex.

We do an in-order traversal of its left child which is nil, so it does nothing.

So we come back to Alex, and then print out Alex, and

then traverse its right sub-tree which is nil and does nothing.

We come back to Alex.

And then we're finished with Alex and we go back to Cathy.

So, we have successfully completed Cathy's left sub-tree.

So we did an in-order traversal of that, so now we're going to print Cathy, and

then do an in-order traversal of its right sub-tree, which is Frank.

So we go to Frank, similarly now we're going to print out Frank.

We've finished with Frank and go back to Cathy, and

now we've completed Cathy totally, so we go back to Les.

We completed Les' left sub-tree, so we're now going to print Les and

then traverse Les' right sub-tree.

So that is Sam, traverse its left sub-tree which is Nancy.

Print it out, go back to Sam, we've completed Sam's left sub-tree, so

we print Sam, and then go ahead and do Sam's right sub-tree which is Violet,

which will end up printing Tony, Violet, and then Wendy.

We're completed with Wendy.

We go back to Violet.

We completed her right sub-tree, so we go back to Sam, completed his right sub-tree,

go back to Les, completed his right sub-tree, and we're done.

So we see we get the elements out in sorted order.

And again, we do the left child.

And then the node and then the right child.

And by our definition of a binary search tree,

that then gives them to us in order because we know all the elements in

the left child are in fact less than or equal to the node itself.

The next depth-first traversal is a pre-order traversal.

Now the in-order traversal really is only defined for a binary tree because

we talk about doing the left child and then the node and then the right child.

And so it's not clear if you had let's say three children,

where it is you'd actually put the node itself.

So you might do the first child and then print the node, and then second and

third child.

Or first child and then second child and print the node, and then third child.

It's kind of undefined then, so not well-defined.

However, these next two, the pre-order and post-order traversal are well defined.

Not just for binary trees, but for

general, arbitrary number of children trees.

So here the pre-order traversal says,

we're going to go ahead first if it's nil we return.

We print the key first, that is, we visit the node itself and then its children.

So we're going to, in this case, go ahead and go to

the Les tree and then print out its key and then go to its children.

So we're going to first go to its left child which is Cathy, and for

Cathy, we then print Cathy, and

then go to its left child which is Alex, print Alex, we go back to Cathy.

And we finished its left child, so then we go do its right child, which is Frank.

We finished Frank.

We finished Cathy.

We go back up to Les.

We've already printed Les.

We've already visited or traversed Les' left child.

Now we can traverse Les' right child, so it'll be Sam, which we'll print out.

And then we'll go to Nancy, which we'll print out, we'll go back up to Sam and

then to Violet, and we will print Violet, and then print Violet's children,

which will be Tony and Wendy and then return back.

A post-order traversal is like a pre-order traversal expect instead of

printing the node itself first, which is a pre, we print it last, which is the post.

So all we've really done is move where this print statement is.

And here then, what's the last of these notes

that's going to be printed? Well it's actually going to be Les,

because we're not going to be able to print Les until we've finished

completely dealing with Les' left sub-tree and right sub-tree.

So we'll visit Les, and then visit Cathy, and then Alex,

and then we'll actually print out Alex.

Once we're done with Alex, we'll go back up to Cathy and down to Frank, and

then print out Frank, and then once we're done with both Alex and

Frank we can then print Cathy.

We go back up to Les, and

we now need to go deal with Les' right child which is Sam.

In order to deal with Sam we go to Nancy, print Nancy, go back up to Sam and

down to Violet, and deal with the Violet tree, which will print out Tony, and

then Wendy, and then Violet.

And on our way back up, then, when we get up to Sam, we have finished its children,

so we can print out Sam.

When we get up to Les, we've finished its children, so we can print out Les.

One thing to note about the recursive traversal

is we do have sort of under the covers, a stack that's being used.

Because in a recursive call, every time we make a call back to a procedure,

we are invoking another frame on the stack.

So we are saving implicitly our information of where we are on the stack.

Breadth-first, we're going to actually use a queue instead of a stack.

So in the breadth-first, we are going to call it level traversal here,

we're going to go ahead and instantiate a queue,

and on the queue first put the root of the tree.

So we put that in the queue and then while the queue is not empty,

we're going to dequeue, so pull a node off, deal with that by printing it and

then if it's got a left child,

enqueue the left child, if it's got a right child, enqueue the right child.

And so this will have the effect of going through and

processing the elements in level order.

We see the example here, and we're going to show the queue.

So here let's say we're just before the while loop, the queue contains Les.

And we're going to now dequeue Les from the queue, output it by printing it, and

then enqueue Les' children which are Cathy and Sam.

Now, we visit those in order, so

first we're going to dequeue Cathy, print it out and then enqueue its children.

Remember when we're enqueuing we go at the end of the line, so

Alex and Frank go after Sam.

So now we're going to dequeue Sam, print it, and

then enqueue its children Nancy and Violet.

So we can see what we've done then is, we first printed Les,

that's level one and then we printed the elements of level two, which are Cathy and

Sam, and now we're going to go on to the elements at level three.

So notice, all the elements in level three,

Alex, Frank, Nancy, and Violet are in the queue already.

And they're all going to be processed before any of the level four nodes

are processed. So even though they'll be pushed in the queue,

since the level three nodes got there first that they're all going to be processed

before we process the level four ones.

So here, we dequeue Alex, print it out, and we're done.

Dequeue Frank, print it out, we're done with Frank.

Dequeue Nancy, print it out, we're done with Nancy.

And Violet, we print it out, but then also enqueue Tony and Wendy, and

then dequeue those and print them out.

So this is a breadth-first search, with an explicit queue,

you can do depth-first searches rather than recursively,

iteratively, but you will need an additional data structure which

is a stack to keep track of the work still to be done.

So in summary, trees are used for lots of different things in computer science.

We've seen that trees have a key and

normally have children, although there are alternative representations of trees.

The tree walks that are normally done are traversals,

are DFS: depth-first search, and BFS: breadth-first search.

There are different types of depth-first search traversals,

pre-order, in-order, and post-order.

When you work with a tree, it's common to use recursive algorithms,

although note that we didn't for the breadth-first search where we needed to

go through the elements of the tree in kind of a non-recursive order.

And finally, in computer science, trees grow down.

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