An Introduction to Trees and Basic Tree Properties!
In this chapter, we are going to study the basics of the tree data structure!
We'll cover the following
Introduction #
Trees consist of vertices (nodes) and edges that connect them. Unlike the linear data structures that we have studied so far, trees are hierarchical. They are similar to Graphs, except that a cycle cannot exist in a Tree - they are acyclic. In other words, there is always exactly one path between any two nodes.
- Root Node: A node with no parent nodes. Generally, trees don’t have to have a root. However, rooted trees have one distinguished node and are largely what we will use in this course.
- Child Node: A node linked to an upper node (Parent Node)
- Parent Nodes: A node that has links to one or more Child Node
- Sibling Node: Nodes that share the same Parent Node
- Leaf Node: A node that doesn’t have any Child Node
- Ancestor Nodes: The nodes on the path from a node d to the root node. Ancestor nodes include node d’s parents, grandparents, and so on.
The figure below shows all the terminologies described above:
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