Question

I am studying about various trees, and came across AVL trees and splay trees. I want to know

1. What is difference between AVL trees and splay trees?
2. On what basis do we select these tress?
3. What are positive’s and negative’s of these trees?
4. What are the performances of these trees in terms of big O notation?

Answer 1

To answer your questions:

1. What is the difference between AVL trees and splay trees? Both splay trees and AVL trees are binary search trees with excellent performance guarantees, but they differ in how they achieve those guarantee that performance. In an AVL tree, the shape of the tree is constrained at all times such that the tree shape is balanced, meaning that the height of the tree never exceeds O(log n). This shape is maintained on insertions and deletions, and does not change during lookups. Splay trees, on the other hand, maintain efficient by reshaping the tree in response to lookups on it. That way, frequently-accessed elements move up toward the top of the tree and have better lookup times. The shape of splay trees is not constrained, and varies based on what lookups are performed.

2. On what basis do we select these trees? There is no hard-and-fast rule about this. However, one key difference between the structures is that AVL trees guarantee fast lookup (O(log n)) on each operation, while splay trees can only guarantee that any sequence of n operations takes at most O(n log n) time. This means that if you need real-time lookups, the AVL tree is likely to be better. However, splay trees tend to be much faster on average, so if you want to minimize the total runtime of tree lookups, the splay tree is likely to be better. Additionally, splay trees support some operations such as splitting and merging very efficiently, while the corresponding AVL tree operations are more involved and less efficient. Splay trees are more memory-efficient than AVL trees, because they do not need to store balance information in the nodes. However, AVL trees are more useful in multithreaded environments with lots of lookups, because lookups in an AVL tree can be done in parallel while they can’t in splay trees. Because splay trees reshape themselves based on lookups, if you only need to access a small subset of the elements of the tree, or if you access some elements much more than others, the splay tree will outperform the AVL tree. Finally, splay trees tend to be easier to implement than AVL trees, since the rotation logic is much easier.

3. What are the positives and negatives of these trees? See my answer to (2) above.

4. What are the performances of these trees in terms of big-O notation? AVL tree insertion, deletion, and lookups take O(log n) time each. Splay trees have these same guarantees, but the guarantee is only in an amortized sense. Any long sequence of operations will take at most O(n log n) time, but individual operations might take as much as O(n) time.