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Concept
Disjoint-set data structure
Summary
In computer science, a disjoint-set data structure, also called a union–find data structure or merge–find set, is a data structure that stores a collection of disjoint (non-overlapping) sets. Equivalently, it stores a partition of a set into disjoint subsets. It provides operations for adding new sets, merging sets (replacing them by their union), and finding a representative member of a set. The last operation makes it possible to find out efficiently if any two elements are in the same or different sets.
While there are several ways of implementing disjoint-set data structures, in practice they are often identified with a particular implementation called a disjoint-set forest. This is a specialized type of forest which performs unions and finds in near-constant amortized time. To perform a sequence of m addition, union, or find operations on a disjoint-set forest with n nodes requires total time O(mα(n)), where α(n) is the extremely slow-growing inverse Ackermann function. Disjoint-set forests do not guarantee this performance on a per-operation basis. Individual union and find operations can take longer than a constant times α(n) time, but each operation causes the disjoint-set forest to adjust itself so that successive operations are faster. Disjoint-set forests are both asymptotically optimal and practically efficient.
Disjoint-set data structures play a key role in Kruskal's algorithm for finding the minimum spanning tree of a graph. The importance of minimum spanning trees means that disjoint-set data structures underlie a wide variety of algorithms. In addition, disjoint-set data structures also have applications to symbolic computation, as well as in compilers, especially for register allocation problems.
Disjoint-set forests were first described by Bernard A. Galler and Michael J. Fischer in 1964. In 1973, their time complexity was bounded to , the iterated logarithm of , by Hopcroft and Ullman. In 1975, Robert Tarjan was the first to prove the (inverse Ackermann function) upper bound on the algorithm's time complexity,.
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