construct boost priority queue based on iterators

Question

I have a list of binomial_heaps and each iteration of the algorithm I have to update the priority of an element in some of the binomial_heaps. For this I use the update function of the boost binomial_heap . However one of the binomial_heaps I have to remove and rebuild completely (as all priorities change). Instead of using push every time (which if I understand correctly would have a complexity of n*log(n)) I would like to construct it based on iterators of an underlying container (a kind of heapify or make_heap operation which would be linear time). This seems possible in the standard priority_queue , but not in the boost implementation. On the other hand the standard one does not provide me with an update function. Is there a way around this where I can have both, or another library that supports both. Or maybe my reasoning, that pushing all elements on an empty priority queue is slower, is not correct?

Some might say there is something seriously wrong with the fact that I need to rebuild an entire priority queue which would make the use of the priority queue completely superfluous. The algorithm I want to implement is "Finding community structure in very large networks by Aaron Clauset" in which the authors do exactly that (unless I didn't interpret it correctly)

(Sorry couldn't post the link to the paper as I don't have enough reputation to post more than 2 links)

Answer 1

The "fast modularity" algorithm by Clauset et al. ( paper here , code here ) uses a pair of linked data structures. On the one hand, you have a sparse matrix data structure (which is really just an adjacency list in which instead of storing the elements hanging off a particular array element as a linked list, we store them using a balanced binary tree data structure), and a max-heap. All the values in the sparse matrix (which are really the dQ_ij values for the potential merges in the algorithm) are also stored in the max-heap.

So, the max-heap is just an efficient way of finding the edge in the sparse matrix with the most positive value. Once you have the ij pair for that edge, you want to "insert" the elements of column (row) i into the elements of column (row) j, and then you want to delete column (row) i. So, you're not going to rebuild the entire max-heap after each pop from the max-heap. Instead, you want to delete some elements from it (the ones in the row/column that you delete from the sparse matrix) and update the values of others (the ones in the updated row/column for j).

This is where the linked data structure is helpful -- in the original implementation, each element in the sparse matrix stores a pointer to its corresponding entry in the max-heap so that if you update the value in the sparse matrix, you can then find the corresponding element in the max-heap and update its value. Once you do this, you need to re-heapify the updated heap element, by letting it move (recursively) up or down in the heap. Similarly, if you delete an element in the sparse matrix, you can find its entry in the heap and call a delete function on it.