STORAGE REDUCTION THROUGH MINIMAL SPANNING TREES

Kang, A. N. C. and Lee, R. C. T. and Chang, C. L. and Chang, S. K. (1975) STORAGE REDUCTION THROUGH MINIMAL SPANNING TREES. Technical Report CS75003-R, Computer Science, Virginia Tech.

Abstract

In this paper, we shall show that a minimal spanning tree for a set of data can be used to reduce the amount of memory space required to store the data. Intuitively, the more points we have, the more likely our method will be better than the straightforward method where the data is stored in the form of a matrix. In Section 3, we shall show that once the number of samples exceeds a certain threshold, it is guaranteed that our method is better. Experiments were conducted on a set of randomly generated artificial data and a set of patient data. In the arttficial data experiment, we saved 23% for the worst case and 45% for the best case. In the patient data experiment, we saved 73% of the memory space.