Amortized Computational Complexity

Abstract

A powerful technique in the complexity analysis of data structures is amortization, or averaging over time. Amortized running time is a realistic but robust complexity measure for which we can obtain surprisingly tight upper and lower bounds on a variety of algorithms. By following the principle of designing algorithms whose amortized complexity is low, we obtain “self-adjusting” data structures that are simple, flexible and efficient. This paper surveys recent work by several researchers on amortized complexity.