AVL Tree

In computer science, an AVL tree is a self-balancing binary search tree, and it was the first such data structure to be invented. In an AVL tree, the heights of the two child subtrees of any node differ by at most one; if at any time they differ by more than one, rebalancing is done to restore this property. Lookup, insertion, and deletion all take O(log n) time in both the average and worst cases, where n is the number of nodes in the tree prior to the operation. Insertions and deletions may require the tree to be rebalanced by one or more tree rotations.

The AVL tree is named after its two Soviet inventors, G. M. Adelson-Velskii and E. M. Landis, who published it in their 1962 paper "An algorithm for the organization of information".

AVL trees are often compared with red-black trees because they support the same set of operations and because red-black trees also take O(log n) time for the basic operations. Because AVL trees are more rigidly balanced, they are faster than red-black trees for lookup-intensive applications. Similar to red-black trees, AVL trees are in general not weight-balanced; that is, sibling nodes can have hugely differing numbers of descendants.