Java Min-Heap Made Easy: How to Implement Min-Heap for Efficient Data Handling | Quick Tutorial

A heap is a data structure that allows efficient access to the maximum or minimum element in a collection. It's commonly used in algorithms that require sorting or finding the top k elements in a collection. Java provides a built-in PriorityQueue class that can be used to implement a heap.

To create a min-heap of integers, we can create a PriorityQueue object without any arguments. This creates a PriorityQueue with a default capacity of 11 and a natural ordering based on the elements' compareTo() method.

In this example, we add integers to the min-heap using the add method, and we retrieve the minimum element from the heap using the poll method. The poll method removes and returns the head (i.e., the minimum element) of the PriorityQueue.