6. Union-Find Data Structure
The chapter discusses the Union-Find data structure, essential for implementing Kruskal's algorithm to find minimum cost spanning trees in weighted graphs. It explains the operations of 'find' and 'union' for managing dynamic connectivity within a partition of a set. Amortized analysis is presented to showcase the efficiency of these operations over multiple executions, achieving a complexity of O(m log n) for m operations, which is comparable to other graph algorithms like Prim's.
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What we have learnt
- The Union-Find data structure is crucial for efficiently processing minimum cost spanning trees.
- The 'find' operation determines which component a vertex belongs to, while the 'union' operation merges two components.
- Amortized analysis explains the efficiency of union and find operations across multiple uses, resulting in an average complexity of log m per operation.
Key Concepts
- -- UnionFind Data Structure
- A data structure that maintains a partition of a set and supports efficient 'find' and 'union' operations.
- -- Kruskal's Algorithm
- An algorithm used for finding the minimum spanning tree of a weighted graph by processing edges in ascending order of cost.
- -- Amortized Complexity
- A method for analyzing the performance of algorithms that averages the time taken over a sequence of operations.
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