DMTCS Proceedings, 23rd Intern. Meeting on Probabilistic, Combinatorial, and Asymptotic Methods for the Analysis of Algorithms (AofA'12)

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A New Binomial Recurrence Arising in a Graphical Compression Algorithm

Yongwook Choi, Charles Knessl, Wojciech Szpankowski

Abstract


In a recently proposed graphical compression algorithm by Choi and Szpankowski (2009), the following tree arose in the course of the analysis. The root contains n balls that are consequently distributed between two subtrees according to a simple rule: In each step, all balls independently move down to the left subtree (say with probability p) or the right subtree (with probability 1-p). A new node is created as long as there is at least one ball in that node. Furthermore, a nonnegative integer d is given, and at level d or greater one ball is removed from the leftmost node before the balls move down to the next level. These steps are repeated until all balls are removed (i.e., after n+d steps). Observe that when d=∞ the above tree can be modeled as a trie that stores n independent sequences generated by a memoryless source with parameter p. Therefore, we coin the name (n,d)-tries for the tree just described, and to which we often refer simply as d-tries. Parameters of such a tree (e.g., path length, depth, size) are described by an interesting two-dimensional recurrence (in terms of n and d) that 13; to the best of our knowledge 13; was not analyzed before. We study it, and show how much parameters of such a (n,d)-trie differ from the corresponding parameters of regular tries. We use methods of analytic algorithmics, from Mellin transforms to analytic poissonization.

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