Heap (data structure)

In computer science, a heap is a tree-based data structure that

satisfies the heap property: In a max heap, for any given node C,
if P is a parent node of C, then the key (the value) of P is greater
than or equal to the key of C. In a min heap, the key of P is less
than or equal to the key of C.[1] The node at the "top" of the heap
(with no parents) is called the root node.

The heap is one maximally efficient implementation of an abstract

data type called a priority queue, and in fact, priority queues are
often referred to as "heaps", regardless of how they may be
implemented. In a heap, the highest (or lowest) priority element is
always stored at the root. However, a heap is not a sorted structure;
it can be regarded as being partially ordered. A heap is a useful data
structure when it is necessary to repeatedly remove the object with Example of a binary max-heap with
the highest (or lowest) priority, or when insertions need to be node keys being integers between 1
interspersed with removals of the root node. and 100

A common implementation of a heap is the binary heap, in which

the tree is a complete[2] binary tree (see figure). The heap data structure, specifically the binary heap, was
introduced by J. W. J. Williams in 1964, as a data structure for the heapsort sorting algorithm.[3] Heaps are
also crucial in several efficient graph algorithms such as Dijkstra's algorithm. When a heap is a complete
binary tree, it has the smallest possible height—a heap with N nodes and a branches for each node always
has loga N height.

Note that, as shown in the graphic, there is no implied ordering between siblings or cousins and no implied
sequence for an in-order traversal (as there would be in, e.g., a binary search tree). The heap relation
mentioned above applies only between nodes and their parents, grandparents, etc. The maximum number of
children each node can have depends on the type of heap.

Heaps are typically constructed in-place in the same array where the elements are stored, with their structure
being implicit in the access pattern of the operations. Heaps differ in this way from other data structures
with similar or in some cases better theoretic bounds such as Radix trees in that they require no additional
memory beyond that used for storing the keys.

Operations
The common operations involving heaps are:

Basic

find-max (or find-min): find a maximum item of a max-heap, or a minimum item of a min-heap,
respectively (a.k.a. peek)
insert: adding a new key to the heap (a.k.a., push[4])
 extract-max (or extract-min): returns the node of maximum value from a max heap [or
minimum value from a min heap] after removing it from the heap (a.k.a., pop[5])
delete-max (or delete-min): removing the root node of a max heap (or min heap), respectively
replace: pop root and push a new key. This is more efficient than a pop followed by a push,
since it only needs to balance once, not twice, and is appropriate for fixed-size heaps.[6]

Creation

create-heap: create an empty heap

heapify: create a heap out of given array of elements
merge (union): joining two heaps to form a valid new heap containing all the elements of
both, preserving the original heaps.
meld: joining two heaps to form a valid new heap containing all the elements of both,
destroying the original heaps.

Inspection

size: return the number of items in the heap.

is-empty: return true if the heap is empty, false otherwise.

Internal

increase-key or decrease-key: updating a key within a max- or min-heap, respectively

delete: delete an arbitrary node (followed by moving last node and sifting to maintain heap)
sift-up: move a node up in the tree, as long as needed; used to restore heap condition after
insertion. Called "sift" because node moves up the tree until it reaches the correct level, as in
a sieve.
sift-down: move a node down in the tree, similar to sift-up; used to restore heap condition
after deletion or replacement.

Implementation
Heaps are usually implemented with an array, as follows:

Each element in the array represents a node of the heap, and

The parent / child relationship is defined implicitly by the elements' indices in the array.
For a binary heap, in the array, the first index
contains the root element. The next two indices of
the array contain the root's children. The next four
indices contain the four children of the root's two
child nodes, and so on. Therefore, given a node at
index i, its children are at indices and
, and its parent is at index ⌊(i−1)/2⌋. This Example of a complete binary max-heap with node keys
simple indexing scheme makes it efficient to move being integers from 1 to 100 and how it would be stored
"up" or "down" the tree. in an array.

Balancing a heap is done by sift-up or sift-down

operations (swapping elements which are out of order). As we can build a heap from an array without
requiring extra memory (for the nodes, for example), heapsort can be used to sort an array in-place.
After an element is inserted into or deleted from a heap, the heap property may be violated, and the heap
must be re-balanced by swapping elements within the array.

Although different type of heaps implement the operations differently, the most common way is as follows:

Insertion: Add the new element at the end of the heap, in the first available free space. If this
will violate the heap property, sift up the new element (swim operation) until the heap
property has been reestablished.
Extraction: Remove the root and insert the last element of the heap in the root. If this will
violate the heap property, sift down the new root (sink operation) to reestablish the heap
property.
Replacement: Remove the root and put the new element in the root and sift down. When
compared to extraction followed by insertion, this avoids a sift up step.
Construction of a binary (or d-ary) heap out of a given array of elements may be performed in linear time
using the classic Floyd algorithm, with the worst-case number of comparisons equal to 2N − 2s2 (N) − e2 (N)
(for a binary heap), where s2 (N) is the sum of all digits of the binary representation of N and e2 (N) is the
exponent of 2 in the prime factorization of N.[7] This is faster than a sequence of consecutive insertions into
an originally empty heap, which is log-linear.[a]

Variants
2–3 heap Fibonacci heap Randomized meldable
B-heap K-D Heap heap
Beap Leaf heap Skew heap
Binary heap Leftist heap Soft heap
Binomial heap Min-max heap Ternary heap
Brodal queue Pairing heap Treap
d-ary heap Radix heap Weak heap

Comparison of theoretic bounds for variants

Here are time complexities[8] of various heap data structures. Function names assume a max-heap. For the
meaning of "O(f)" and "Θ(f)" see Big O notation.
 Operation find-max delete-max insert increase-key meld

Binary[8] Θ(1) Θ(log n) O(log n) O(log n) Θ(n)

Leftist Θ(1) Θ(log n) Θ(log n) O(log n) Θ(log n)

Binomial[8][9] Θ(1) Θ(log n) Θ(1)[b] Θ(log n) O(log n)

Skew binomial[10] Θ(1) Θ(log n) Θ(1) Θ(log n) O(log n)[c]

Pairing[11] Θ(1) O(log n)[b] Θ(1) o(log n)[b][d] Θ(1)

Rank-pairing[14] Θ(1) O(log n)[b] Θ(1) Θ(1)[b] Θ(1)

Fibonacci[8][15] Θ(1) O(log n)[b] Θ(1) Θ(1)[b] Θ(1)

Strict Fibonacci[16] Θ(1) O(log n) Θ(1) Θ(1) Θ(1)

Brodal[17][e] Θ(1) O(log n) Θ(1) Θ(1) Θ(1)

2–3 heap[19] O(log n) O(log n)[b] O(log n)[b] Θ(1) ?

a. Each insertion takes O(log(k)) in the existing size of the heap, thus . Since

, a constant factor (half) of these insertions are within a constant factor

of the maximum, so asymptotically we can assume ; formally the time is
. This can also be readily seen from Stirling's approximation.
b. Amortized time.
c. Brodal and Okasaki describe a technique to reduce the worst-case complexity of meld to
Θ(1); this technique applies to any heap datastructure that has insert in Θ(1) and find-max,
delete-max, meld in O(log n).
d. Lower bound of [12] upper bound of [13]

e. Brodal and Okasaki later describe a persistent variant with the same bounds except for
decrease-key, which is not supported. Heaps with n elements can be constructed bottom-up
in O(n).[18]

Applications
The heap data structure has many applications.

Heapsort: One of the best sorting methods being in-place and with no quadratic worst-case
scenarios.
Selection algorithms: A heap allows access to the min or max element in constant time, and
other selections (such as median or kth-element) can be done in sub-linear time on data that
is in a heap.[20]
Graph algorithms: By using heaps as internal traversal data structures, run time will be
reduced by polynomial order. Examples of such problems are Prim's minimal-spanning-tree
algorithm and Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm.
Priority queue: A priority queue is an abstract concept like "a list" or "a map"; just as a list can
be implemented with a linked list or an array, a priority queue can be implemented with a
heap or a variety of other methods.
K-way merge: A heap data structure is useful to merge many already-sorted input streams
into a single sorted output stream. Examples of the need for merging include external sorting
and streaming results from distributed data such as a log structured merge tree. The inner
 loop is obtaining the min element, replacing with the next element for the corresponding
input stream, then doing a sift-down heap operation. (Alternatively the replace function.)
(Using extract-max and insert functions of a priority queue are much less efficient.)

Programming language implementations

The C++ Standard Library provides the make_heap, push_heap and pop_heap
algorithms for heaps (usually implemented as binary heaps), which operate on arbitrary
random access iterators. It treats the iterators as a reference to an array, and uses the array-
to-heap conversion. It also provides the container adaptor priority_queue, which wraps
these facilities in a container-like class. However, there is no standard support for the
replace, sift-up/sift-down, or decrease/increase-key operations.
The Boost C++ libraries include a heaps library. Unlike the STL, it supports decrease and
increase operations, and supports additional types of heap: specifically, it supports d-ary,
binomial, Fibonacci, pairing and skew heaps.
There is a generic heap implementation (https://github.com/valyala/gheap) for C and C++
with D-ary heap and B-heap support. It provides an STL-like API.
The standard library of the D programming language includes
std.container.BinaryHeap (https://dlang.org/phobos/std_container_binaryheap.html),
which is implemented in terms of D's ranges (https://tour.dlang.org/tour/en/basics/ranges).
Instances can be constructed from any random-access range (https://dlang.org/phobos/std_r
ange_primitives.html#isRandomAccessRange). BinaryHeap exposes an input range
interface (https://dlang.org/phobos/std_range_primitives.html#isInputRange) that allows
iteration with D's built-in foreach statements and integration with the range-based API of
the std.algorithm package (https://dlang.org/phobos/std_algorithm.html).
For Haskell there is the Data.Heap (https://hackage.haskell.org/package/heaps) module.
The Java platform (since version 1.5) provides a binary heap implementation with the class
java.util.PriorityQueue (https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/1
9/docs/api/java.base/java/util/PriorityQueue.html) in the Java
Collections Framework. This class implements by default a min-heap; to implement a max-
heap, programmer should write a custom comparator. There is no support for the replace,
sift-up/sift-down, or decrease/increase-key operations.
Python has a heapq (https://docs.python.org/library/heapq.html) module that implements a
priority queue using a binary heap. The library exposes a heapreplace function to support k-
way merging.
PHP has both max-heap (SplMaxHeap) and min-heap (SplMinHeap) as of version 5.3 in
the Standard PHP Library.
Perl has implementations of binary, binomial, and Fibonacci heaps in the Heap (https://meta
cpan.org/module/Heap) distribution available on CPAN.
The Go language contains a heap (https://golang.org/pkg/container/heap/) package with
heap algorithms that operate on an arbitrary type that satisfies a given interface. That
package does not support the replace, sift-up/sift-down, or decrease/increase-key
operations.
Apple's Core Foundation library contains a CFBinaryHeap (https://developer.apple.com/lib
rary/mac/#documentation/CoreFoundation/Reference/CFBinaryHeapRef/Reference/referenc
e.html) structure.
Pharo has an implementation of a heap in the Collections-Sequenceable package along
with a set of test cases. A heap is used in the implementation of the timer event loop.
The Rust programming language has a binary max-heap implementation, BinaryHeap (htt
ps://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.BinaryHeap.html), in the collections module
of its standard library.
 .NET has PriorityQueue (https://docs.microsoft.com/dotnet/api/system.collections.generic.pri
orityqueue-2) class which uses quaternary (d-ary) min-heap implementation. It is available
from .NET 6.

See also
Sorting algorithm
Search data structure
Stack (abstract data type)
Queue (abstract data type)
Tree (data structure)
Treap, a form of binary search tree based on heap-ordered trees

References
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External links
Heap (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Heap.html) at Wolfram MathWorld
Explanation (https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/software/AlgAnim/heaps.html) of how the basic
heap algorithms work
Bentley, Jon Louis (2000). Programming Pearls (2nd ed.). Addison Wesley. pp. 147–162.
ISBN 0201657880.

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