dsa-trees-and-heaps

name: dsa-trees-and-heaps description: "Binary trees, BSTs, heaps, priority queues, tries, and tree traversal patterns with complexity analysis and practical trade-offs. Use when: teaching tree or heap data structures, analyzing priority queue implementations, reviewing BFS or DFS traversal code, optimizing sorted collection usage, explaining BST vs heap trade-offs, or modeling hierarchical data."

DSA Trees and Heaps

When to Use

• Teaching binary tree structure, traversal, or balancing concepts
• Explaining heap / priority queue semantics and implementation
• Reviewing code that sorts to find a min/max (O(n log n) vs O(n) heap alternative)
• Analyzing Cosmos DB index structures or hierarchical partition key design
• Modeling prioritized background job queues
• Explaining BFS vs DFS traversal choice

Binary Trees and BST

Binary Tree Fundamentals

A binary tree is a hierarchical structure where each node has at most two children (left, right). Tree height h determines traversal cost:

• Balanced tree: h = O(log n) — optimal
• Degenerate tree (skewed): h = O(n) — degrades to linked list performance

Binary Search Tree (BST)

BST invariant: left.value < node.value < right.value for every node.

Self-balancing variants (AVL, Red-Black) maintain O(log n) guarantees. .NET SortedDictionary<TKey, TValue> uses a red-black tree internally.

Biotrackr Anchor — Cosmos DB B-Tree Index

Cosmos DB builds a B-tree index over indexed properties. A B-tree is a self-balancing tree generalizing BSTs to many children per node, optimized for disk I/O.

GET /activity/{date}   →   index lookup on 'date' field   →   O(log n) page reads

Teaching angle: A missing index forces a full container scan — O(n). Adding an index converts repeated queries to O(log n). The partition key is a first-level hash dispatch (O(1)), and the index is a second-level tree lookup (O(log n)) within the partition.

Heaps and Priority Queues

Min-Heap / Max-Heap

A heap is a complete binary tree where:

• Min-heap: parent ≤ children (root is the minimum element)
• Max-heap: parent ≥ children (root is the maximum element)

.NET provides PriorityQueue<TElement, TPriority> (min-heap by default).

Biotrackr Anchor — Priority-Ordered Report Jobs

A report generation queue where urgent reports (user-initiated) preempt scheduled reports (background batch) maps directly to a min-heap priority queue:

// Lower priority number = higher urgency
var jobQueue = new PriorityQueue<ReportJob, int>();
jobQueue.Enqueue(new ReportJob("batch-summary"), priority: 10);
jobQueue.Enqueue(new ReportJob("user-request"),  priority: 1);

var next = jobQueue.Dequeue(); // returns "user-request" — O(log n)

Teaching angle: Why not sort the list each time? Sorting is O(n log n). A heap maintains the invariant at O(log n) per insert/extract — dramatically cheaper when jobs arrive continuously.

Biotrackr Anchor — MinBy/MaxBy vs Sort

In Biotrackr, weightGroups.OrderByDescending(mg => mg.Date).First() sorts to find the latest record — O(n log n). The same result using MaxBy() is O(n):

// O(n log n) — sorts everything to get one item
var latest = weightGroups.OrderByDescending(mg => mg.Date).First();

// O(n) — single pass, no sort
var latest = weightGroups.MaxBy(mg => mg.Date);

Teaching angle: LINQ's MaxBy()/MinBy() are O(n) linear scans. They do not build a heap internally — they just track the running maximum in a single pass. A heap is only warranted when you need repeated extract-min/max operations on a dynamic collection.

Traversal Patterns

In-Order, Pre-Order, Post-Order (DFS)

In-Order  (Left → Root → Right): produces sorted output for a BST
Pre-Order (Root → Left → Right): useful for tree serialisation
Post-Order(Left → Right → Root): useful for deletion or bottom-up evaluation

All three are O(n) — every node visited exactly once.

BFS (Level-Order)

Uses a queue to visit nodes level by level:

queue = [root]
while queue not empty:
    node = dequeue
    process(node)
    enqueue(node.left), enqueue(node.right) if not null

BFS is the right choice when you need the shortest path in an unweighted tree or the minimum depth of the tree.

Decision: Heap vs BST vs Sorted List

Tries (Prefix Trees)

A trie stores strings character-by-character, sharing common prefixes.

• Insert and search: O(m) where m = string length — independent of number of strings
• Best for: autocomplete, prefix matching, IP routing tables

Biotrackr relevance (conceptual): APIM routing rules share a prefix-match structure. Routing /activity/* vs /sleep/* vs /food/* can be modelled as a trie over URL path segments — common prefix / shared at root, domain segment splits at depth 1.