Abstract
We present an analysis of the effect of the last-come-first-served heuristic on a linear probing hash table. We study the behavior of successful searches, assuming searches for all elements of the table are equally likely. It is known that the Robin Hood heuristic achieves minimum variance over all linear probing algorithms. We show that the last-come-first-served heuristic achieves this minimum up to lower order terms.
An accurate analysis of this algorithm is made by introducing a new transform which we call the diagonal Poisson transform as it resembles the Poisson transform. We present important properties of this transform, as well as its application to solve some classes of recurrences. We feel this is the main contribution of the paper.
This research was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada under grant No. A8237, the Information Technology Research Centre of Ontario, and FONDECYT(Chile) under grant 1940271.
Part of this work was done while the first author was on sabbatical at the University of Waterloo.
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© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Poblete, P.V., Viola, A., Munro, J.I. (1994). The analysis of a hashing scheme by the diagonal poisson transform. In: van Leeuwen, J. (eds) Algorithms — ESA '94. ESA 1994. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 855. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0049400
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0049400
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