On Succinct Representations of Binary Trees

TL;DR

This paper introduces four new succinct binary tree representations derived from transformations of ordinal trees, supporting various operations efficiently and connecting to known structures like Zaks' sequence and Fischer-Heun's min-heap.

Contribution

It presents four symmetric succinct binary tree representations with near-optimal space and efficient query support, including the first based on Zaks' sequence and a space-efficient Cartesian tree encoding.

Findings

Uses $2n + n/( ext{log} n)^{O(1)}$ bits for representation

Supports navigation, numbering, subtree size, and LCA queries in constant time

Provides a space-efficient Cartesian tree encoding with $O( ext{sqrt}(n) ext{ log } n)$ bits

Abstract

We observe that a standard transformation between \emph{ordinal} trees (arbitrary rooted trees with ordered children) and binary trees leads to interesting succinct binary tree representations. There are four symmetric versions of these transformations. Via these transformations we get four succinct representations of $n$-node binary trees that use $2n + n/(\log n)^{O(1)}$ bits and support (among other operations) navigation, inorder numbering, one of pre- or post-order numbering, subtree size and lowest common ancestor (LCA) queries. The ability to support inorder numbering is crucial for the well-known range-minimum query (RMQ) problem on an array $A$ of $n$ ordered values. While this functionality, and more, is also supported in $O(1)$ time using $2n + o(n)$ bits by Davoodi et al.'s (\emph{Phil. Trans. Royal Soc. A} \textbf{372} (2014)) extension of a representation by Farzan and Munro (\emph{Algorithmica} \textbf{6} (2014)), their \emph{redundancy}, or the $o(n)$ term, is much larger, and their approach may not be suitable for practical implementations. One of these transformations is related to the Zaks' sequence (S.~Zaks, \emph{Theor. Comput. Sci.} \textbf{10} (1980)) for encoding binary trees, and we thus provide the first succinct binary tree representation based on Zaks' sequence. Another of these transformations is equivalent to Fischer and Heun's (\emph{SIAM J. Comput.} \textbf{40} (2011)) \minheap\ structure for this problem. Yet another variant allows an encoding of the Cartesian tree of $A$ to be constructed from $A$ using only $O(\sqrt{n} \log n)$ bits of working space.