Bottom-up rebalancing binary search trees by flipping a coin

Rebalancing schemes for dynamic binary search trees are numerous in the literature, where the goal is to maintain trees of low height, either in the worst-case or expected sense. In this paper we study randomized rebalancing schemes for sequences of n insertions into an initially empty binary search tree, under the assumption that a tree only stores the elements and the tree structure without any additional balance information. Seidel (2009) presented a top-down randomized insertion algorithm, where insertions take expected O(lg²n) time, and the resulting trees have the same distribution as inserting a uniform random permutation of n elements into a binary search tree without rebalancing. Seidel states as an open problem if a similar result can be achieved with bottom-up insertions. In this paper we fail to answer this question. We consider two simple canonical randomized bottom-up insertion algorithms on binary search trees, assuming that an insertion is given the position where to insert the next element. The subsequent rebalancing is performed bottom-up in expected O(1) time, uses expected O(1) random bits, performs at most two rotations, and the rotations appear with geometrically decreasing probability in the distance from the leaf. For some insertion sequences the expected depth of each node is proved to be O(lgn). On the negative side, we prove for both algorithms that there exist simple insertion sequences where the expected depth is Ω(n), i.e., the studied rebalancing schemes are not competitive with (most) other rebalancing schemes in the literature.