In what order should you insert a set of known keys into a B-Tree to get minimal height?

Question

Given a fixed number of keys or values(stored either in array or in some data structure) and order of b-tree, can we determine the sequence of inserting keys that would gene

Answer 1

The following trick should work for most ordered search trees, assuming the data to insert are the integers 1..n.

Consider the binary representation of your integer keys - for 1..7 (with dots for zeros) that's...

Bit : 210
  1 : ..1
  2 : .1.
  3 : .11
  4 : 1..
  5 : 1.1
  6 : 11.
  7 : 111

Bit 2 changes least often, Bit 0 changes most often. That's the opposite of what we want, so what if we reverse the order of those bits, then sort our keys in order of this bit-reversed value...

Bit : 210    Rev
  4 : 1.. -> ..1 : 1
  ------------------
  2 : .1. -> .1. : 2
  6 : 11. -> .11 : 3
  ------------------
  1 : ..1 -> 1.. : 4
  5 : 1.1 -> 1.1 : 5
  3 : .11 -> 11. : 6
  7 : 111 -> 111 : 7

It's easiest to explain this in terms of an unbalanced binary search tree, growing by adding leaves. The first item is dead centre - it's exactly the item we want for the root. Then we add the keys for the next layer down. Finally, we add the leaf layer. At every step, the tree is as balanced as it can be, so even if you happen to be building an AVL or red-black balanced tree, the rebalancing logic should never be invoked.

[EDIT I just realised you don't need to sort the data based on those bit-reversed values in order to access the keys in that order. The trick to that is to notice that bit-reversing is its own inverse. As well as mapping keys to positions, it maps positions to keys. So if you loop through from 1..n, you can use this bit-reversed value to decide which item to insert next - for the first insert use the 4th item, for the second insert use the second item and so on. One complication - you have to round n upwards to one less than a power of two (7 is OK, but use 15 instead of 8) and you have to bounds-check the bit-reversed values. The reason is that bit-reversing can move some in-bounds positions out-of-bounds and visa versa.]

Actually, for a red-black tree some rebalancing logic will be invoked, but it should just be re-colouring nodes - not rearranging them. However, I haven't double checked, so don't rely on this claim.

For a B tree, the height of the tree grows by adding a new root. Proving this works is, therefore, a little awkward (and it may require a more careful node-splitting than a B tree normally requires) but the basic idea is the same. Although rebalancing occurs, it occurs in a balanced way because of the order of inserts.

This can be generalised for any set of known-in-advance keys because, once the keys are sorted, you can assign suitable indexes based on that sorted order.

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WARNING - This isn't an efficient way to construct a perfectly balanced tree from known already-sorted data.

If you have your data already sorted, and know it's size, you can build a perfectly balanced tree in O(n) time. Here's some pseudocode...

if size is zero, return null
from the size, decide which index should be the (subtree) root
recurse for the left subtree, giving that index as the size (assuming 0 is a valid index)
take the next item to build the (subtree) root
recurse for the right subtree, giving (size - (index + 1)) as the size
add the left and right subtree results as the child pointers
return the new (subtree) root

Basically, this decides the structure of the tree based on the size and traverses that structure, building the actual nodes along the way. It shouldn't be too hard to adapt it for B Trees.