Pairing heap

Variant of heap data structure

A pairing heap is a type of heap data structure with relatively simple implementation and excellent practical amortized performance, introduced by Michael Fredman, Robert Sedgewick, Daniel Sleator, and Robert Tarjan in 1986. Pairing heaps are heap-ordered multiway tree structures, and can be considered simplified Fibonacci heaps. They are considered a "robust choice" for implementing such algorithms as Prim's MST algorithm, and support the following operations :find-min: simply return the top element of the heap. meld: compare the two root elements, the smaller remains the root of the result, the larger element and its subtree is appended as a child of this root. insert: create a new heap for the inserted element and meld into the original heap. decrease-key (optional): remove the subtree rooted at the key to be decreased, replace the key with a smaller key, then meld the result back into the heap. delete-min: remove the root and do repeated melds of its subtrees until one tree remains. Various merging strategies are employed.

This keyword could refer to multiple things. Here are some suggestions: