UE23CS252A: Data Structures and its Applications

This course introduces abstract concepts, shows how the concepts are useful for problem solving and then shows how the abstractions can be made concrete by using a programming language. Equal emphasis is placed on both the abstract and the concrete versions of a concept so that the student learns about the concept itself, its implementation and its application.

Course Objectives:

  • Basic approaches and mindsets for analyzing and designing data structures and construct essential skills of data structures to store and retrieve data quickly and usefully (efficiently).
  • Usage of different data structures that support different set of operations which are suitable for different type of tasks.
  • Implement how to insert, delete, search and modify data in any given data structures- Stack, Queue, List, Tree, heap, Graphs.
  • Implement a given application using the available data structure.microprocessor and its functioning at the clock cycle level.

Course Outcomes:

  • Choose relevant data structures for any given application
  • Apply the required to implement any data structure.
  • Appropriate data structure in competitive programming.
  • Design and develop efficient software systems with good knowledge of data structures.

Course Contents:

Unit 1: Linked List and Stacks

Review of C, Static and Dynamic Memory Allocation. Linked List: Doubly Linked List, Circular Linked List – Single and Double, Multilist: Introduction to sparse matrix (structure). Skip list Case study: Dictionary implementation using skip list Stacks: Basic structure of a Stack, Implementation of a Stack using Arrays & Linked list. Applications of Stack: Function execution, Nested functions, Recursion: Tower of Hanoi. Conversion & Evaluation of an expression: Infix to postfix, Infix to prefix, Evaluation of an Expression, Matching of Parenthesis.

Unit 2: Queues and Trees

Queues & Dequeue: Basic Structure of a Simple Queue, Circular Queue, Priority Queue, Dequeue and its implementation using Arrays and Linked List. Applications of Queue: Case Study – Josephus problem, CPU scheduling- Implementation using queue (simple /circular). General: N-ary trees, Binary Trees, Binary Search Trees (BST) and Forest: definition, properties, conversion of an N-ary tree and a Forest to a binary tree. Traversal of trees: Preorder, Inorder and Postorder.

Unit 3: Application of Trees and Introduction to Graphs

Implementation of BST using arrays and dynamic allocation: Insertion and deletion operations, Implementation of binary expression tree., Threaded binary search tree and its implementation. Heap: Implementation using arrays. Implementation of Priority Queue using heap - min and max heap. Applications of Trees and Heaps: Implementation of a dictionary / decision tree (Words with their meanings). Balanced Trees: definition, AVL Trees, Rotation, Splay Tree, Graphs: Introduction, Properties, Representation of graphs: Adjacency matrix, Adjacency list. Implementation of graphs using adjacency matrix and lists. Graph traversal methods: Depth first search, Breadth first search techniques. Application: Graph representation: Representation of computer network topology.

Unit 4: Applications of Graphs, B-Trees, Suffix Tree and Hashing

Application of BFS and DFS: Connectivity of graph, finding path in a network. Suffix Trees: Definition, Introduction of Trie Trees, Suffix trees. Implementations of TRIE trees, insert, delete and search operations. Hashing: Simple mapping / Hashing: hash function, hash table, Collision Handling: Separate Chaining & Open Addressing, Double Hashing, and Rehashing. Applications: URLs decoding, Word prediction using TRIE trees / Suffix Trees.