Heapsort

Heapsort

A run of the heapsort algorithm sorting an array of randomly permuted values. In the first stage of the algorithm the array elements are reordered to satisfy the heap property. Before the actual sorting takes place, the heap tree structure is shown briefly for illustration.
Class	Sorting algorithm
Data structure	Array
Worst-case performance	${\displaystyle O(n\log n)}$
Best-case performance	${\displaystyle O(n\log n)}$
Average performance	${\displaystyle O(n\log n)}$
Worst-case space complexity	${\displaystyle O(1)}$ auxiliary

In computer science, heapsort is a comparison-based sorting algorithm. Heapsort can be thought of as an improved selection sort: like that algorithm, it divides its input into a sorted and an unsorted region, and it iteratively shrinks the unsorted region by extracting the largest element and moving that to the sorted region. The improvement consists of the use of a heap data structure rather than a linear-time search to find the maximum.

Although somewhat slower in practice on most machines than a well-implemented quicksort, it has the advantage of a more favorable worst-case O(n log n) runtime. Heapsort is an in-place algorithm, but it is not a stable sort.

Heapsort was invented by J. W. J. Williams in 1964. This was also the birth of the heap, presented already by Williams as a useful data structure in its own right. In the same year, R. W. Floyd published an improved version that could sort an array in-place, continuing his earlier research into the treesort algorithm.

The heapsort algorithm can be divided into two parts.

In the first step, a heap is built out of the data. The heap is often placed in an array with the layout of a complete binary tree. The complete binary tree maps the binary tree structure into the array indices; each array index represents a node; the index of the node's parent, left child branch, or right child branch are simple expressions. For a zero-based array, the root node is stored at index 0; if i is the index of the current node, then

In the second step, a sorted array is created by repeatedly removing the largest element from the heap (the root of the heap), and inserting it into the array. The heap is updated after each removal to maintain the heap. Once all objects have been removed from the heap, the result is a sorted array.