English

Bounds and Algorithms for Alphabetic Codes and Binary Search Trees

Information Theory 2024-07-24 v1 Data Structures and Algorithms math.IT

Abstract

Alphabetic codes and binary search trees are combinatorial structures that abstract search procedures in ordered sets endowed with probability distributions. In this paper, we design new linear-time algorithms to construct alphabetic codes, and we show that the obtained codes are not too far from being optimal. Moreover, we exploit our results on alphabetic codes to provide new bounds on the average cost of optimal binary search trees. Our results improve on the best-known bounds on the average cost of optimal binary search trees present in the literature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.16443,
  title  = {Bounds and Algorithms for Alphabetic Codes and Binary Search Trees},
  author = {Roberto Bruno and Roberto De Prisco and Alfredo De Santis and Ugo Vaccaro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.16443},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Accepted by IEEE Transaction on Information Theory

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:50:49.301Z