Adaptation To Different Datasets
When sort keys for a dataset are uniformly distributed numbers, linear interpolation is straightforward to implement and will find an index very near the sought value.
On the other hand, for a phone book sorted by name, the straightforward approach to interpolation search doesn't apply. The same high-level principles can still apply, though: one can estimate a name's position in the phone book using the relative frequencies of letters in names and use that as a probe location.
Some interpolation search implementations may not work as expected when a run of equal key values exists. The simplest implementation of interpolation search won't necessarily select the first (or last) element of such a run. The interpolation calculation also must be written to avoid division by zero.
Read more about this topic: Interpolation Search
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