Heap sort is a comparison based sorting technique based on Binary Heap data
structure. It is similar to selection sort where we first find the maximum element and
place the maximum element at the end. We repeat the same process for remaining
element.
What is Binary Heap?
Let us first define a Complete Binary Tree. A complete binary tree is a binary tree in
which every level, except possibly the last, is completely filled, and all nodes are as
far left as possible
A Binary Heap is a Complete Binary Tree where items are stored in a special order
such that value in a parent node is greater(or smaller) than the values in its two
children nodes. The former is called as max heap and the latter is called min heap.
The heap can be represented by binary tree or array.
Why array based representation for Binary Heap?
Since a Binary Heap is a Complete Binary Tree, it can be easily represented as
array and array based representation is space efficient. If the parent node is stored
at index I, the left child can be calculated by 2 * I + 1 and right child by 2 * I + 2
(assuming the indexing starts at 0).
Heap Sort Algorithm for sorting in increasing order:
1. Build a max heap from the input data.
2. At this point, the largest item is stored at the root of the heap. Replace it with the
last item of the heap followed by reducing the size of heap by 1. Finally, heapify the
root of tree.
3. Repeat above steps while size of heap is greater than 1.
How to build the heap?
Heapify procedure can be applied to a node only if its children nodes are heapified.
So the heapification must be performed in the bottom up order.