Open Access
2017 Radix sort trees in the large
Steven N. Evans, Anton Wakolbinger
Electron. Commun. Probab. 22: 1-13 (2017). DOI: 10.1214/17-ECP77

Abstract

The trie-based radix sort algorithm stores pairwise different infinite binary strings in the leaves of a binary tree in a way that the Ulam-Harris coding of each leaf equals a prefix (that is, an initial segment) of the corresponding string, with the prefixes being of minimal length so that they are pairwise different. We investigate the radix sort tree chains – the tree-valued Markov chains that arise when successively storing the finite collections of random infinite binary strings $Z_1,\ldots , Z_n$, $n=1,2,\ldots $ according to the trie-based radix sort algorithm, where the source strings $Z_1, Z_2,\ldots $ are independent and identically distributed. We establish a bijective correspondence between the full Doob–Martin boundary of the radix sort tree chain with a symmetric Bernoulli source (that is, each $Z_k$ is a fair coin-tossing sequence) and the family of radix sort tree chains for which the common distribution of the $Z_k$ is a diffuse probability measure on $\{0,1\}^\infty $. In essence, our result characterizes all the ways that it is possible to condition such a chain of radix sort trees consistently on its behavior “in the large”.

Citation

Download Citation

Steven N. Evans. Anton Wakolbinger. "Radix sort trees in the large." Electron. Commun. Probab. 22 1 - 13, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1214/17-ECP77

Information

Received: 7 October 2016; Accepted: 9 August 2017; Published: 2017
First available in Project Euclid: 1 December 2017

zbMATH: 06827050
MathSciNet: MR3734107
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1214/17-ECP77

Subjects:
Primary: 60J50
Secondary: 60J10 , 68W40

Keywords: Binary tree , bridge , Doob–Martin kernel , exchangeability , Harmonic function , tail $\sigma $-field

Back to Top