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Tree (data structure)

In computer science, a tree is a widely used abstract data type (ADT)—or data structure implementing this ADT—that simulates a hierarchical tree structure, with a root value and subtrees of children with a parent node, represented as a set of linked nodes. In computer science, a tree is a widely used abstract data type (ADT)—or data structure implementing this ADT—that simulates a hierarchical tree structure, with a root value and subtrees of children with a parent node, represented as a set of linked nodes. A tree data structure can be defined recursively as a collection of nodes (starting at a root node), where each node is a data structure consisting of a value, together with a list of references to nodes (the 'children'), with the constraints that no reference is duplicated, and none points to the root. Alternatively, a tree can be defined abstractly as a whole (globally) as an ordered tree, with a value assigned to each node. Both these perspectives are useful: while a tree can be analyzed mathematically as a whole, when actually represented as a data structure it is usually represented and worked with separately by node (rather than as a set of nodes and an adjacency list of edges between nodes, as one may represent a digraph, for instance). For example, looking at a tree as a whole, one can talk about 'the parent node' of a given node, but in general as a data structure a given node only contains the list of its children, but does not contain a reference to its parent (if any).

[ "Algorithm", "Theoretical computer science", "Data mining", "Artificial intelligence", "Programming language", "tree mining", "Frequent subtree mining", "K-ary tree", "Interval tree", "tree structured data" ]
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