Towards analysing sequences of operations for dynamic data structures

Abstract

This paper presents the average case performance analysis of dynamic data structures subjected to arbitrary sequences of insert, delete and query operations. To such sequences of operations are associated, for each data type, a specific continued fraction and a familly of orthogonal polynomials : Tchebycheff for stacks, Laguerre for dictionaries, Hermite for priority queues, Meixner for linear lists and Charlier for symbol tables. We define a notion of integrated cost of a data structure as the average cost over all possible sequences of operations. Our main result is an explicit expression, for each of these data structures, of the generating function for integrated costs as a linear integral transform of the generating functions for individual operation costs. We use the result to explicitly compute integrated costs of various efficient data structure implementations.