How to find largest common sub-tree in the given two binary search trees?

Question

Two BSTs (Binary Search Trees) are given. How to find largest common sub-tree in the given two binary trees?

EDIT 1: Here

Answer 1

Assuming there are no duplicate values in the trees:

LargestSubtree(Tree tree1, Tree tree2)
    Int bestMatch := 0
    Int bestMatchCount := 0
    For each Node n in tree1  //should iterate breadth-first
        //possible optimization:  we can skip every node that is part of each subtree we find
        Node n2 := BinarySearch(tree2(n.value))
        Int matchCount := CountMatches(n, n2)
        If (matchCount > bestMatchCount)
            bestMatch := n.value
            bestMatchCount := matchCount
        End
    End

    Return ExtractSubtree(BinarySearch(tree1(bestMatch)), BinarySearch(tree2(bestMatch)))
End

CountMatches(Node n1, Node n2)
    If (!n1 || !n2 || n1.value != n2.value)
        Return 0
    End
    Return 1 + CountMatches(n1.left, n2.left) + CountMatches(n1.right, n2.right)
End

ExtractSubtree(Node n1, Node n2)
    If (!n1 || !n2 || n1.value != n2.value)
        Return nil
    End

    Node result := New Node(n1.value)
    result.left := ExtractSubtree(n1.left, n2.left)
    result.right := ExtractSubtree(n1.right, n2.right)
    Return result
End

To briefly explain, this is a brute-force solution to the problem. It does a breadth-first walk of the first tree. For each node, it performs a BinarySearch of the second tree to locate the corresponding node in that tree. Then using those nodes it evaluates the total size of the common subtree rooted there. If the subtree is larger than any previously found subtree, it remembers it for later so that it can construct and return a copy of the largest subtree when the algorithm completes.

This algorithm does not handle duplicate values. It could be extended to do so by using a BinarySearch implementation that returns a list of all nodes with the given value, instead of just a single node. Then the algorithm could iterate this list and evaluate the subtree for each node and then proceed as normal.

The running time of this algorithm is O(n log m) (it traverses n nodes in the first tree, and performs a log m binary-search operation for each one), putting it on par with most common sorting algorithms. The space complexity is O(1) while running (nothing allocated beyond a few temporary variables), and O(n) when it returns its result (because it creates an explicit copy of the subtree, which may not be required depending upon exactly how the algorithm is supposed to express its result). So even this brute-force approach should perform reasonably well, although as noted by other answers an O(n) solution is possible.

There are also possible optimizations that could be applied to this algorithm, such as skipping over any nodes that were contained in a previously evaluated subtree. Because the tree-walk is breadth-first we know than any node that was part of some prior subtree cannot ever be the root of a larger subtree. This could significantly improve the performance of the algorithm in certain cases, but the worst-case running time (two trees with no common subtrees) would still be O(n log m).