Why Use Heaps?

Where are Heaps Used?

Just like other data structures, Heaps are also used in many computing algorithms. The major uses of Heaps are elaborated below:

1. Order statistics: Heaps are primarily used for efficiently finding the smallest or largest element in an array.

2. Priority Queues: Priority queues can be efficiently implemented using Binary Heap because it supports insert(), delete(), extractmax(), and decreaseKey() operations in $O(logn)$ time. Binomoial Heaps and Fibonacci Heaps are variations of Binary Heaps. These variations also perform union() in $O(logn)$ time, which is an $O(n)$ operation in a Binary Heap. Heap-implemented priority queues are used in Graph algorithms like Prim’s Algorithm and Dijkstra’s algorithm.