Lecture 34: Priority Queues: Understanding, Implementing, Using, Applications, API, Data Handling

welcome back! today, we'll delve into priority queues, a flexible data structure that generalizes sorting and has numerous applications. we'll explore the api and some elementary implementations, starting with a brief review of collections in java, including stacks, queues, and randomized queues.

priority queues allow us to insert items and then remove the largest or smallest item, based on total order. this is useful in various applications, from event-driven simulation to numerical computation, data compression, graph searching, and more.

we'll walk through the api for priority queues, which includes methods like insert(), deletemax(), isempty(), and size(). priority queues are particularly helpful in handling large streams of data, allowing us to efficiently keep track of the largest or smallest elements.

we'll discuss the challenges of finding the largest m items in a stream of n items and explore elementary implementations using unordered and ordered arrays. finally, we'll introduce the binary heap, a data structure that provides an efficient and practical solution to these challenges, offering a time complexity of o(n log m) and requiring only m space.

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