Why Use Heaps?

The lesson highlights the significant applications and reasons for picking Heaps Data Structure while programming.

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Where are Heaps Used?

Just like other data structures, Heaps are also used in many computing algorithms. The major uses of Heaps are elaborated below:

  1. Order statistics: Heaps are primarily used for efficiently finding the smallest or largest element in an array.

  2. Priority Queues: Priority queues can be efficiently implemented using Binary Heap because it supports insert(), delete(), extractmax(), and decreaseKey() operations in O(logn)O(logn) time. Binomoial Heaps and Fibonacci Heaps are variations of Binary Heaps. These variations also perform union() in O(logn)O(logn) time, which is an O(n)O(n) operation in a Binary Heap. Heap-implemented priority queues are used in Graph algorithms like Prim’s Algorithm and Dijkstra’s algorithm.

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