Tree-Structured Data

Tree-structured—hierarchical—data is all around us. In addition to a real tree you might have in your back yard or in the nearby park that has a trunk and branches, you may attend a basketball tournament where the bracket is a time-based version of a tree structure, with only one team ending up at the root at the end of the tournament. At your job, the management structure is, by nature, a tree structure with the boss or owner at the top, and a couple or many levels of management before reaching the hourly workers at the bottom of the tree.