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Trie

Jan 06, 2025, 4 min read

  • A trie is a -ary search tree for performing key (often strings) searches within a set

    All children of a node have a common prefix associated with their parent node. The root of the tree is associated with the empty string.

    • Key lookup is achieved in time where is the maximum key length.

  • A radix tree is a compressed trie wherein nodes with only one child get merged with their parents. This reduces the space complexity of storing the tree and time complexity of key search.

    • This is ideal if keys are static and sparse within the key space.

Suffix Trees

  • A suffix tree is a compact trie of all suffixes of a given text as their keys and positions in the text as their values.

    More specifically, the suffix tree for the string of length is defined such that the following hold:

    • The tree has exactly leaves numbered to .
    • Every internal node except for the root has at least two children.
    • Each edge is labelled with a non-empty substring of
    • No two edges starting out of a node can have string labels beginning with the same character.
    • The string obtained by concatenating string labels found on the path from the root to leaf spells the suffix

  • is typically padded with a special end of string character so that no suffix of is also the prefix of another.

  • Sometimes we may use suffix links during construction such that

    • All internal nodes have a suffix link to another internal node.
    • If the path from the root to a node, spells where is a single character and is a possibly empty string, it has a suffix link to the internal node representing .
      • (Farach 1.1) such a suffix link is guaranteed to exist. For nodes that spell , there is always a node in the suffix tree that spells

  • The suffix tree satisfies the following properties.

    • It allows for a linear time solution to the longest common substring problem.
    • The cost to the time speed ups provided by suffix trees is added space complexity.

  • The suffix tree can be constructed in time.

    • For general alphabets, assuming each edge is lexicographically sorted, the construction is bound by . With linear construction, the bound becomes exactly , where is the number of distinct characters.

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