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Concept
Fibonacci heap
Summary
In computer science, a Fibonacci heap is a data structure for priority queue operations, consisting of a collection of heap-ordered trees. It has a better amortized running time than many other priority queue data structures including the binary heap and binomial heap. Michael L. Fredman and Robert E. Tarjan developed Fibonacci heaps in 1984 and published them in a scientific journal in 1987. Fibonacci heaps are named after the Fibonacci numbers, which are used in their running time analysis.
For the Fibonacci heap, the find-minimum operation takes constant (O(1)) amortized time. The insert and decrease key operations also work in constant amortized time. Deleting an element (most often used in the special case of deleting the minimum element) works in O(log n) amortized time, where n is the size of the heap. This means that starting from an empty data structure, any sequence of a insert and decrease key operations and b delete operations would take O(a + b log n) worst case time, where n is the maximum heap size. In a binary or binomial heap, such a sequence of operations would take O((a + b) log n) time. A Fibonacci heap is thus better than a binary or binomial heap when b is smaller than a by a non-constant factor. It is also possible to merge two Fibonacci heaps in constant amortized time, improving on the logarithmic merge time of a binomial heap, and improving on binary heaps which cannot handle merges efficiently.
Using Fibonacci heaps for priority queues improves the asymptotic running time of important algorithms, such as Dijkstra's algorithm for computing the shortest path between two nodes in a graph, compared to the same algorithm using other slower priority queue data structures.
A Fibonacci heap is a collection of trees satisfying the minimum-heap property, that is, the key of a child is always greater than or equal to the key of the parent. This implies that the minimum key is always at the root of one of the trees. Compared with binomial heaps, the structure of a Fibonacci heap is more flexible.
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