In computer science, a radix tree (also patricia trie or radix trie or compact prefix tree) is a space-optimized trie data structure where each node with only one child is merged with its child. The result is that every internal node has at least two children. Unlike in regular tries, edges can be labeled with sequences of elements as well as single elements. This makes them much more efficient for small sets (especially if the strings are long) and for sets of strings that share long prefixes.
As an optimization, edge labels can be stored in constant size by using two pointers to a string (for the first and last elements). [1]
Note that although the examples in this article show strings as sequences of characters, the type of the string elements can be chosen arbitrarily (for example, as a bit or byte of the string representation when using multibyte character encodings or Unicode).
Applications
As mentioned, radix trees are useful for constructing associative arrays with keys that can be expressed as strings. They find particular application in the area of IP routing, where the ability to contain large ranges of values with a few exceptions is particularly suited to the hierarchical organization of IP addresses.[2] They are also used for inverted indexes of text documents in information retrieval.
Operations
Radix tries support insertion, deletion, and searching operations. Insertion adds a new string to the trie while trying to minimize the amount of data stored. Deletion removes a string from the trie. Searching operations include exact lookup, find predecessor, find successor, and find all strings with a prefix. All of these operations are O(k) where k is the maximum length of all strings in the set. This list may not be exhaustive.
Lookup
Finding a string in a Patricia trie
The lookup operation determines if a string exists in a trie. Most operations modify this approach in some way to handle their specific tasks. For instance, the node where a string terminates may be of importance. This operation is similar to tries except that some edges consume multiple elements.
The following pseudo code assumes that these classes exist.
Edge
- Node targetNode
- string label
Node
- Array of Edges edges
- function isLeaf()
function lookup(string x){ // Begin at the root with no elements found Node traverseNode := root; int elementsFound := 0; // Traverse until a leaf is found or it is not possible to continue while (traverseNode != null && !traverseNode.isLeaf() && elementsFound < x.length) { // Get the next edge to explore based on the elements not yet found in x Edge nextEdge := select edge from traverseNode.edges where edge.label is a prefix of x.suffix(elementsFound) // x.suffix(elementsFound) returns the last (x.length - elementsFound) elements of x // Was an edge found? if (nextEdge != null) { // Set the next node to explore traverseNode := nextEdge.targetNode; // Increment elements found based on the label stored at the edge elementsFound += nextEdge.label.length; } else { // Terminate loop traverseNode := null; } } // A match is found if we arrive at a leaf node and have used up exactly x.length elements return (traverseNode != null && traverseNode.isLeaf() && elementsFound == x.length);} Insertion
To insert a string, we search the tree until we can make no further progress. At this point we either add a new outgoing edge labeled with all remaining elements in the input string, or if there is already an outgoing edge sharing a prefix with the remaining input string, we split it into two edges (the first labeled with the common prefix) and proceed. This splitting step ensures that no node has more children than there are possible string elements.
Several cases of insertion are shown below, though more may exist. Note that r simply represents the root. It is assumed that edges can be labelled with empty strings to terminate strings where necessary and that the root has no incoming edge.
Insert 'water' at the root
Insert 'slower' while keeping 'slow'
Insert 'test' which is a prefix of 'tester'
Insert 'team' while splitting 'test' and creating a new edge label 'st'
Insert 'toast' while splitting 'te' and moving previous strings a level lower
Deletion
To delete a string x from a tree, we first locate the leaf representing x. Then, assuming x exists, we remove the corresponding leaf node. If the parent of our leaf node has only one other child, then that child's incoming label is appended to the parent's incoming label and the child is removed.
Additional Operations
- Find all strings with common prefix: Returns an array of strings which begin with the same prefix.
- Find predecessor: Locates the largest string less than a given string, by lexicographic order.
- Find successor: Locates the smallest string greater than a given string, by lexicographic order.
History
Donald R. Morrison first described what he called "Patricia trees" in 1968;[3] the name comes from the acronym PATRICIA, which stands for "Practical Algorithm To Retrieve Information Coded In Alphanumeric". Gernot Gwehenberger independently invented and described the data structure at about the same time.[4]
Comparison to other data structures
(In the following comparisons, it is assumed that the keys are of length k and the data structure contains n members.)
Unlike balanced trees, radix trees permit lookup, insertion, and deletion in O(k) time rather than O(log n). This doesn't seem like an advantage, since normally k ≥ log n, but in a balanced tree every comparison is a string comparison requiring O(k) worst-case time, many of which are slow in practice due to long common prefixes (in the case where comparisons begin at the start of the string). In a trie, all comparisons require constant time, but it takes m comparisons to look up a string of length m. Radix trees can perform these operations with fewer comparisons, and require many fewer nodes.
Radix trees also share the disadvantages of tries, however: as they can only be applied to strings of elements or elements with an efficiently reversible mapping to strings, they lack the full generality of balanced search trees, which apply to any data type with a total ordering. A reversible mapping to strings can be used to produce the required total ordering for balanced search trees, but not the other way around. This can also be problematic if a data type only provides a comparison operation, but not a (de)serialization operation.
Hash tables are commonly said to have expected O(1) insertion and deletion times, but this is only true when considering computation of the hash of the key to be a constant time operation. When hashing the key is taken into account, hash tables have expected O(k) insertion and deletion times, but may take longer in the worst-case depending on how collisions are handled. Radix trees have worst-case O(k) insertion and deletion. The successor/predecessor operations of radix trees are also not implemented by hash tables.
Variants
A common extension of radix trees uses two colors of nodes, 'black' and 'white'. To check if a given string is stored in the tree, the search starts from the top and follows the edges of the input string until no further progress can be made. If the search-string is consumed and the final node is a black node, the search has failed; if it is white, the search has succeeded. This enables us to add a large range of strings with a common prefix to the tree, using white nodes, then remove a small set of "exceptions" in a space-efficient manner by inserting them using black nodes.
The HAT-trie is a radix tree based cache-conscious data structure that offers efficient string storage and retrieval, and ordered iterations. Performance, with respect to both time and space, is comparable to the cache-conscious hashtable.[5][6] See HAT trie implementation notes at [1]
See also
References
- ^ Morin, Patrick. "Data Structures for Strings". http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~morin/teac hing/5408/notes/strings.pdf. Retrieved 15 April 2012.
- ^ Knizhnik, Konstantin. "Patricia Tries: A Better Index For Prefix Searches", Dr. Dobb's Journal, June, 2008.
- ^ Morrison, Donald R. Practical Algorithm to Retrieve Information Coded in Alphanumeric
- ^ G. Gwehenberger, Anwendung einer binären Verweiskettenmethode beim Aufbau von Listen. Elektronische Rechenanlagen 10 (1968), pp. 223–226
- ^ Askitis, Nikolas; Sinha, Ranjan (2007). "HAT-trie: A Cache-conscious Trie-based Data Structure for Strings". Proceedings of the 30th Australasian Conference on Computer science 62. pp. 97–105. ISBN 1-920682-43-0
- ^ Askitis, Nikolas; Sinha, Ranjan (2010). Engineering scalable, cache and space efficient tries for strings. doi:10.1007/s00778-010-0183-9. ISBN 1066-8888 (Print) 0949-877X (Online).
External links
Implementations
