Trees

Special Gratitude to Professor Richard F. Gilberg for his inspirational

book out of which this presentation was prepared
Introduction
• Understand and use basic tree terminologies and concepts
• Recognize and define the basic attributes of a binary tree
• Process trees using depth-first and breadth-first traversals
• Parse expressions using a binary tree
• Design and implement Huffman trees
• Understand the basic use and processing of general trees
 Basic Tree
Concepts
• A tree consists of finite set
of elements, called nodes,
and a finite set of directed Edge
lines called branches
(edges), that connect the
nodes.
• The number of branches
associated with a node is Node
the degree of the node.

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Basic Tree Concepts
• Indegree branch is directed towards the node
• Outdegree branch is directed away from the node
• The sum of the indegree and outdegree branches is the
degree of the node.
• If the tree is not empty, the first node is called the root.
• The indegree of the root is, by definition, zero.
• With the exception of the root, all of the nodes in a tree must have an
indegree of exactly one; that is, they may have only one predecessor.

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Basic Tree Concepts
• All nodes in the tree can have zero, one, or more branches
leaving them; that is, they may have outdegree of zero,
one, or more.
• A leaf is any node with an outdegree of zero, that is, a node
with no successors.
• A node that is not a root or a leaf is known as an internal
node.
• A node is a parent if it has successor nodes; that is, if it has
outdegree greater than zero.
• A node with a predecessor is called a child.
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Basic Tree Concepts
• Two or more nodes with the same parents are called siblings.
• An ancestor is any node in the path from the root to the node.
• A descendant is any node in the path below the parent node;
that is, all nodes in the paths from a given node to a leaf are
descendants of that node.
• A path is a sequence of nodes in which each node is adjacent
to the next node.
• The level of a node is its distance from the root. The root is at
level 0, its children are at level 1, etc. …
• A Tree has n vertices and n-1 edges

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Basic Tree Concepts

• The height of the

tree is the level of
the leaf in the
longest path from
the root plus 1. By
definition the height
of any empty tree is
-1.

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Basic Tree Concepts
• A subtree is any
connected structure
below the root. The
first node in the
subtree is known as
the root of the
subtree.

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Recursive definition of a tree

• A tree is a set of nodes that either:

is empty or
has a designated node, called the root, from which hierarchically
descend zero or more subtrees, which are also trees.

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General Tree – organization chart format

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Indented list – bill-of-materials system in which a parts list
represents the assembly structure of an item

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Parenthetical Listing

• Parenthetical Listing – the

algebraic expression, where
each open parenthesis
indicates the start of a new
level and
• each closing parenthesis
completes the current level
and moves up one level in
the tree. A (B (C D) E F (G H I) )
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 Binary Trees

A binary tree can have no more than two descendents. In this

section we discuss the properties of binary trees, four different
binary tree traversals

• Properties
• Binary Tree Traversals
• Expression Trees
• Huffman Code (infix, postfix and prefix expressions)

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Binary Trees

• A binary tree is a tree in which no node can have more than

two subtrees; the maximum outdegree for a node is two.
• In other words, a node can have zero, one, or two subtrees.
• These subtrees are designated as the left subtree and the
right subtree.

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 A Binary tree has the recursive
appearance
Parent
• A Binary tree has three types of vertices :
• A vertex which has 2 edges incident on it
 Vertex of degree 2  Bivalent Vertex
• A vertex which has 3 edges incident on it L. child R. child
 Vertex of degree 3  Trivalent Vertex
• A vertex which has only one edge
incident on it  Vertex of degree 1 
Monovalent Vertex  Pendent Vertex
 A null
tree is a
tree with
no nodes

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 Complete and nearly complete binary
trees
• A complete tree has the maximum
number of entries for its height. The
maximum number is reached when
the last level is full.
• A tree is considered nearly
complete if it has the minimum
height for its nodes and all nodes in
the last level are found on the left
• NOTE: some books call complete
tree a full tree and nearly complete
tree a complete tree
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Depth ( Height) Calculation in a full binary tree of N vertices

Level 0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 ..……………….. 20

Level 1 . . . . 2 3 ….. 21

Level 2 . . 4 5 6 7 ... 22
: :
: :
Level l . . . 2l

20 + 21 + 22 + . . . + 2l = N in case of a full binary tree

Binary Tree Traversal

• A binary tree traversal requires that each node of the tree be

processed once and only once in a predetermined sequence.
• In the depth-first traversal processing process along a path
from the root through one child to the most distant
descendant of that first child before processing a second
child.
• In a breadth first traversal, process all the siblings before
going to the next level

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Binary traversal

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Preorder traversal

A AB

ABC ABCD

ABCDE ABCDEF

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Breadth first
traversal is back
tracking algorithm
design strategy

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