Open In App

We use cookies to ensure you have the best browsing experience on our website. By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understood our Cookie Policy & Privacy Policy

Why is Binary Heap Preferred over BST for Priority Queue?

A typical Priority Queue requires following operations to be efficient.

  1. Get Top Priority Element (Get minimum or maximum)
  2. Insert an element
  3. Remove top priority element
  4. Decrease Key

A Binary Heap supports above operations with following time complexities:



  1. O(1)
  2. O(Logn)
  3. O(Logn)
  4. O(Logn)

 

A Self Balancing Binary Search Tree like AVL Tree, Red-Black Tree, etc can also support above operations with same time complexities.



  1. Finding minimum and maximum are not naturally O(1), but can be easily implemented in O(1) by keeping an extra pointer to minimum or maximum and updating the pointer with insertion and deletion if required. With deletion we can update by finding inorder predecessor or successor.
  2. Inserting an element is naturally O(Logn)
  3. Removing maximum or minimum are also O(Logn) 
  4. Decrease key can be done in O(Logn) by doing a deletion followed by insertion. See this for details.

So why is Binary Heap Preferred for Priority Queue?

Is Binary Heap always better? Although Binary Heap is for Priority Queue, BSTs have their own advantages and the list of advantages is in-fact bigger compared to binary heap.

Article Tags :
DSA
Heap
Recommended Articles
1. Should we declare as Queue or Priority Queue while using Priority Queue in Java?
2. What is Priority Queue | Introduction to Priority Queue
3. Why is Binary Search preferred over Ternary Search?
4. Why can't a Priority Queue wrap around like an ordinary Queue?
5. Why does Queue have front but Priority-queue has top in stl?
6. Difference between Binary Heap, Binomial Heap and Fibonacci Heap
7. Priority Queue using Binary Heap
8. Heap and Priority Queue using heapq module in Python
9. How to implement Priority Queue - using Heap or Array?
10. How to implement stack using priority queue or heap?
11. Priority Queue using Queue and Heapdict module in Python
12. Difference between Circular Queue and Priority Queue
13. Can we use Simple Queue instead of Priority queue to implement Dijkstra's Algorithm?
14. Turn a Queue into a Priority Queue
15. Why Quick Sort preferred for Arrays and Merge Sort for Linked Lists?
16. Advantages of circular queue over linear queue
17. Convert Min Heap to Max Heap
18. Heap Sort for decreasing order using min heap
19. When building a Heap, is the structure of Heap unique?
20. Difference between Min Heap and Max Heap
21. What's the relationship between "a" heap and "the" heap?
22. Priority Queue using Linked List
23. Priority Queue using Doubly Linked List
24. Priority Queue in Python
25. Double ended priority queue