Trie vs hash table
A trie has the following advantages over hash table:
Tries drawbacks:
- Looking up data in a trie is faster in the worst case, O(m) time (where m is the length of a search string), compared to an imperfect hash table. An imperfect hash table can have key collisions. A key collision is the hash function mapping of different keys to the same position in a hash table. The worst-case lookup speed in an imperfect hash table is O(N) time, but far more typically is O(1), with O(m) time spent evaluating the hash.
- There are no collisions of different keys in a trie.
- Buckets in a trie, which are analogous to hash table buckets that store key collisions, are necessary only if a single key is associated with more than one value.
- There is no need to provide a hash function or to change hash functions as more keys are added to a trie.
- A trie can provide an alphabetical ordering of the entries by key.
Tries drawbacks:
- Tries can be slower in some cases than hash tables for looking up data, especially if the data is directly accessed on a hard disk drive or some other secondary storage device where the random-access time is high compared to main memory.
- Some keys, such as floating point numbers, can lead to long chains and prefixes that are not particularly meaningful. Nevertheless a bit-wise trie can handle standard IEEE single and double format floating point numbers.
- Some tries can require more space than a hash table, as memory may be allocated for each character in the search string, rather than a single chunk of memory for the whole entry, as in most hash tables.
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