Samples of Hierarchical Model

1. PAT Expressions

2. Overlapped Lists

3. Lists of References

4. Proximal Nodes

5. Tree Matching

1. PAT Expressions:
PAT (Patricia) trees, or Patricia tries, are a space-optimized version of
a trie (prefix tree) used in applications such as routing tables, IP
address storage, and various types of hierarchical data structures.
They compress chains of single-child nodes, making them efficient for
representing hierarchical data.

In the context of hierarchical models, Patricia expressions (or Patricia

trees) can be used to efficiently represent and search for hierarchical
relationships. Below is an example of how a hierarchical structure
might be represented using Patricia trees.

Example: File System Hierarchy

Imagine a file system hierarchy, which is inherently a nested structure:

/home/user/documents/report.txt
/home/user/documents/sheet.xlsx
/home/user/photos/vacation.jpg
/home/admin/config/settings.conf
Patricia Tree Representation

In a Patricia tree, this structure would be represented by compressing

common prefixes:

|
+- home
|
+- user
| |
| +- documents
| | |
| | +- report.txt
| | +- sheet.xlsx
| |
| +- photos
| |
| +- vacation.jpg
|
+- admin
|
+- config
|
+- settings.conf
Explanation:

● Compressed Path: The Patricia tree expression compresses the

common prefix, such as home -> user ->, which is shared by
multiple files and directories.
● Hierarchical Nesting: The structure is inherently hierarchical,
where directories contain subdirectories and files. This nesting is
preserved in the Patricia tree representation, allowing efficient
traversal and lookup.
● Efficiency: By compressing the paths, Patricia trees reduce the
memory usage and allow faster searching compared to a regular
trie or a list structure.

Application:

Patricia trees are particularly useful in scenarios where you need to

efficiently store and retrieve hierarchical data with shared prefixes,
such as:

● IP routing tables, where many IP addresses share common

prefixes.
● File system representations.
● Domain name resolution, where domain names often share
common suffixes.

This hierarchical model contrasts with the Overlapped Lists model

where nesting isn't allowed, and the relationships between elements
are not hierarchical but rather overlapping.

Drawbacks of PAT Expressions:

Patricia trees (PAT) are efficient data structures for certain

applications, particularly those involving hierarchical or prefix-based
data. However, they do come with some drawbacks:

1. Complexity of Implementation
 ● Explanation: Patricia trees are more complex to implement
compared to simpler data structures like arrays, linked lists, or
even regular tries. The compression of nodes and management
of bit-level operations (especially in binary Patricia trees) requires
careful coding and can be prone to bugs.
● Impact: This complexity can make debugging and maintenance
more challenging, particularly in systems where simplicity is
valued.

2. Efficiency with Small or Sparse Data Sets

● Explanation: Patricia trees are most efficient when handling

large, dense data sets with many common prefixes. However, if
the data set is small or sparse (e.g., few shared prefixes), the
advantages of Patricia trees diminish.
● Impact: In these cases, the overhead of managing the tree
structure might outweigh the benefits, making simpler data
structures more efficient.

3. Insertion and Deletion Complexity

● Explanation: Inserting or deleting nodes in a Patricia tree can

be more complex compared to other data structures. Adjusting
the tree to maintain its compressed nature after insertions or
deletions can involve splitting or merging nodes, which can be
computationally expensive.
● Impact: Frequent insertions and deletions can degrade
performance, especially if the tree needs to be rebalanced or if
many nodes need to be updated.

4. Limited to Prefix-based Data

● Explanation: Patricia trees are specifically designed for

prefix-based data. They are not well-suited for data that does not
have a common prefix or where the structure is not hierarchical.
● Impact: If the data does not naturally fit into a prefix hierarchy,
using a Patricia tree might lead to inefficient storage and
 retrieval, making other data structures like hash tables or B-trees
more appropriate.

5. Memory Usage for Large Nodes

● Explanation: In cases where nodes store long prefixes, the

memory usage can become significant, especially if each node
needs to store additional metadata or pointers. While Patricia
trees optimize memory for common prefixes, they may still use
more memory than simpler structures in certain cases.
● Impact: This can be problematic in memory-constrained
environments, where more compact data structures might be
preferable.

6. Less Optimal for Random Access

● Explanation: Patricia trees are designed for efficient prefix

search, but they are not optimized for random access. Retrieving
an element without using the prefix search mechanism can be
slower compared to data structures like arrays or hash tables.
● Impact: If the application requires frequent random access to
elements, the performance might be suboptimal.

7. Scalability Concerns with Extremely Large Data Sets

● Explanation: For extremely large data sets, the Patricia tree

might still suffer from scalability issues, particularly in terms of
balancing the tree and managing very deep nodes. While Patricia
trees compress paths, the tree can still become deep and
complex.
● Impact: In these cases, more advanced data structures like
Radix trees or hybrid structures might be necessary to maintain
performance.
 2. Overlapped Lists:
The "Overlapped Lists" model is a concept often used in geographic
information systems (GIS) or data structures where regions or areas are
represented as lists. The key features of this model are:

1. Overlap Allowed: Regions or areas can overlap with each other.

This means that a single point or sub-area can belong to more than
one region at the same time. For example, if you have two regions (A
and B), a particular area could be a part of both A and B
simultaneously.
2. No Nesting: Nesting, in this context, refers to one region being
entirely contained within another, forming a hierarchical structure. The
Overlapped Lists model does not allow for this kind of hierarchical
containment. Instead, each region is treated as a separate entity, and
while they can overlap, one cannot be fully contained within another.

■ This approach is useful in scenarios where you need to represent

shared or common areas between regions but do not want to create a
strict hierarchy of containment.

Example1: Zoning in a City:

1. Zoning in a City: Imagine a city is divided into different zones for

planning purposes: Residential Zone, Commercial Zone, and
Industrial Zone.
● Allowed Overlap: There could be areas where the Residential Zone
overlaps with the Commercial Zone. This overlap could represent
mixed-use areas where both residential and commercial activities are
allowed. Here, the overlap indicates that some properties belong to
both zones.
● No Nesting: However, the Residential Zone cannot be entirely
nested within the Commercial Zone. If one region were completely
within the other, this model would not treat it as a subset or child of
the other region but as two distinct entities with some possible
 overlap.

Example 2: Educational Districts

Think of a region divided into different educational districts.

● Allowed Overlap: An area could belong to both District X and District

Y. This might happen in cases where schools in overlapping regions
serve students from multiple districts.
● No Nesting: District X cannot be entirely within District Y, even if in
practice, students from District X attend schools in District Y. The
model would treat them as separate districts with overlapping but
non-nested regions.

Drawbacks of Overlapped Lists:

1. Complexity in Representation

● Explanation: Managing and representing overlapping regions can

become complex, especially as the number of regions increases.
Each overlap has to be carefully tracked, which can make the
data structure more difficult to maintain and understand.
● Impact: This complexity can lead to increased development time,
potential errors in defining or managing overlaps, and challenges
in visualizing the relationships between regions.

2. Difficulty in Hierarchical Relationships

● Explanation: Since the Overlapped Lists model does not allow for
nesting, it cannot represent hierarchical relationships between
regions. For example, if there is a natural hierarchy (e.g., a
district within a state), the model cannot express this
relationship.
● Impact: Applications that require hierarchical organization may
find this model inadequate, leading to the need for additional
data structures or models to capture hierarchical information.

3. Ambiguity in Overlapping Areas

 ● Explanation: Overlapping regions can create ambiguity in
determining ownership or categorization of a particular area. For
instance, if a point belongs to multiple overlapping regions, it can
be unclear which region's rules or attributes should apply.
● Impact: This ambiguity can lead to conflicts or inconsistencies in
decision-making processes, such as zoning regulations, resource
allocation, or categorization tasks.

4. Challenges in Querying

● Explanation: Querying data within an overlapping region model

can be more complex. Determining which regions overlap a given
point or area might require checking multiple regions, which can
be computationally expensive.
● Impact: This can lead to slower query performance, especially in
large datasets where many overlaps exist. Optimizing queries in
such models can be challenging and may require sophisticated
indexing strategies.

5. Potential for Redundancy

● Explanation: Overlapping regions might lead to redundancy in

data storage, where the same area is represented in multiple
regions. This can result in duplicated data and increased storage
requirements.
● Impact: Increased redundancy can lead to inefficiencies in
storage, data management, and potentially, data integrity issues
if updates to overlapping regions are not synchronized correctly.

6. Potential for Inconsistent Data

● Explanation: If overlapping regions are managed independently,

there is a risk that they may become inconsistent with each
other. For example, an update in one overlapping region might
not be reflected in another, leading to discrepancies.
● Impact: This inconsistency can undermine the reliability of the
data model and lead to errors in applications that rely on
 accurate data, such as mapping, geographic information systems
(GIS), or zoning regulations.

3. Lists of References
In a hierarchical model, references can be organized in a structured
way that reflects the relationships between topics, subtopics, and
specific references.

Overlap and Nests are not allowed.

All elements must be of the same type,e.g only sections, or only

paragraphs.

A reference is a pointer to a region of the database.

Here's a sample of how references might be listed in a hierarchical

format:

Example: Hierarchical Model of Academic References

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

● 1.1. General AI Concepts

○ Russell, S., & Norvig, P. (2021). Artificial Intelligence: A
Modern Approach (4th ed.). Pearson.
○ Goodfellow, I., Bengio, Y., & Courville, A. (2016). Deep
Learning. MIT Press.
● 1.2. Machine Learning
○ 1.2.1. Supervised Learning
■ Hastie, T., Tibshirani, R., & Friedman, J. (2009). The
Elements of Statistical Learning (2nd ed.). Springer.
■ Murphy, K. P. (2012). Machine Learning: A
Probabilistic Perspective. MIT Press.
○ 1.2.2. Unsupervised Learning
 ■ Bishop, C. M. (2006). Pattern Recognition and Machine
Learning. Springer.
■ MacQueen, J. (1967). Some methods for classification
and analysis of multivariate observations. In
Proceedings of the Fifth Berkeley Symposium on
Mathematical Statistics and Probability (Vol. 1, pp.
281-297).
● 1.3. Natural Language Processing (NLP)
○ Jurafsky, D., & Martin, J. H. (2020). Speech and Language
Processing (3rd ed.). Pearson.
○ Manning, C. D., Raghavan, P., & Schütze, H. (2008).
Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University
Press.

2. Data Science

● 2.1. Data Analysis

○ McKinney, W. (2017). Python for Data Analysis: Data
Wrangling with Pandas, NumPy, and IPython (2nd ed.).
O'Reilly Media.
○ Wickham, H., & Grolemund, G. (2017). R for Data Science:
Import, Tidy, Transform, Visualize, and Model Data. O'Reilly
Media.
● 2.2. Big Data
○ Zikopoulos, P. C., Eaton, C., DeRoos, D., Deutsch, T., &
Lapis, G. (2011). Understanding Big Data: Analytics for
Enterprise Class Hadoop and Streaming Data. McGraw-Hill
Osborne Media.
○ White, T. (2015). Hadoop: The Definitive Guide (4th ed.).
O'Reilly Media.

3. Computer Vision

● 3.1. Image Recognition

○ Gonzalez, R. C., & Woods, R. E. (2018). Digital Image
Processing (4th ed.). Pearson.
○ Szeliski, R. (2010). Computer Vision: Algorithms and
 Applications. Springer.
● 3.2. Deep Learning in Computer Vision
○ 3.2.1. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)
■ LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep
learning. Nature, 521(7553), 436-444.
■ Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I., & Hinton, G. E. (2012).
ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural
networks. In Advances in Neural Information
Processing Systems (pp. 1097-1105).
● 3.3. Object Detection
○ Redmon, J., Divvala, S., Girshick, R., & Farhadi, A. (2016).
You only look once: Unified, real-time object detection. In
Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and
Pattern Recognition (pp. 779-788).
○ Ren, S., He, K., Girshick, R., & Sun, J. (2015). Faster
R-CNN: Towards real-time object detection with region
proposal networks. In Advances in Neural Information
Processing Systems (pp. 91-99).

Explanation:

● Hierarchy Levels: The references are organized hierarchically,

with broad categories (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Data Science)
at the top level, followed by subcategories (e.g., Machine
Learning, Data Analysis), and finally specific topics (e.g.,
Supervised Learning, Convolutional Neural Networks) with
individual references listed under each.
● Nested Structure: The nested structure reflects the relationships
between the topics. For example, Machine Learning is a subtopic
of AI, and within Machine Learning, Supervised Learning and
Unsupervised Learning are further subtopics.
● Clarity and Organization: This hierarchical model makes it easy to
navigate through the references, allowing a reader to see both
the broad categories and how specific references relate to each
other within those categories.
This hierarchical organization is particularly useful in academic writing,
research papers, and textbooks, where a clear structure helps readers
find relevant references quickly and understand how they are related.
4. Proximal Nodes
In a hierarchical model, proximal nodes refer to nodes that are close to
each other within the hierarchy, often at the same level or within the
same parent node. These nodes are related in some way, typically
sharing a common parent, and can be conceptually or categorically
similar.

Example: Proximal Nodes in a Hierarchical Model

Hierarchical Model: Organizational Structure

Consider the organizational structure of a company:

CEO
|
+-- VP of Engineering
| |
| +-- Engineering Manager 1
| | |
| | +-- Software Engineer 1
| | +-- Software Engineer 2
| |
| +-- Engineering Manager 2
| |
| +-- Software Engineer 3
| +-- Software Engineer 4
|
+-- VP of Marketing
|
+-- Marketing Manager 1
| |
| +-- Marketing Specialist 1
| +-- Marketing Specialist 2
|
+-- Marketing Manager 2
|
+-- Marketing Specialist 3
+-- Marketing Specialist 4
Proximal Nodes Examples

1. Proximal Nodes at the VP Level

○ VP of Engineering and VP of Marketing are proximal
nodes. They are at the same level in the hierarchy,
reporting directly to the CEO, and represent two different
functional areas within the company.
2. Proximal Nodes at the Engineering Manager Level
○ Engineering Manager 1 and Engineering Manager 2
are proximal nodes. They both report to the VP of
Engineering and manage different engineering teams within
the department.
3. Proximal Nodes at the Software Engineer Level
○ Software Engineer 1 and Software Engineer 2 are
proximal nodes under Engineering Manager 1.
○ Software Engineer 3 and Software Engineer 4 are
proximal nodes under Engineering Manager 2.
4. Proximal Nodes at the Marketing Specialist Level
○ Marketing Specialist 1 and Marketing Specialist 2 are
proximal nodes under Marketing Manager 1.
○ Marketing Specialist 3 and Marketing Specialist 4 are
proximal nodes under Marketing Manager 2.

Explanation:

● Common Parent: Proximal nodes share a common parent node.

For example, both Engineering Managers report to the VP of
Engineering, and the Software Engineers report to their
respective Engineering Managers.
● Same Level of Hierarchy: Proximal nodes typically reside at
the same level within the hierarchy. For instance, all Software
Engineers are at the same hierarchical level, though they are
managed by different Engineering Managers.
● Functional Similarity: In many cases, proximal nodes
 represent roles or functions that are similar or related. For
example, all the Marketing Specialists perform similar roles
within the Marketing department, even though they report to
different managers.

Use Case of Proximal Nodes:

● Collaboration and Communication: Understanding the

concept of proximal nodes is important in organizational design,
as it helps identify individuals or teams that are likely to
collaborate or require coordination.
● Resource Allocation: Proximal nodes often share resources or
have similar needs, making it easier to allocate resources
efficiently.
● Role Clarity: By organizing roles into proximal nodes,
organizations can ensure that similar roles are grouped together,
making it easier to define responsibilities and expectations.
5. Tree Matching
Tree matching in hierarchical structures involves comparing the
structures of two or more trees to identify similarities, differences, or
specific patterns. This is useful in various applications, including data
analysis, organizational structure comparisons, and more.

Example: Tree Matching in Hierarchical Structures

Scenario: Comparing Organizational Structures

Let’s compare the organizational structures of two companies,

Company X and Company Y, to identify similarities and differences.

Company X - Hierarchical Tree:

CEO
|
+-- VP of Engineering
| |
| +-- Engineering Manager
| |
| +-- Software Developer
| +-- Hardware Engineer
|
+-- VP of Sales
|
+-- Sales Manager
|
+-- Account Executive
+-- Sales Analyst
Company Y - Hierarchical Tree:

CEO
|
+-- VP of Technology
| |
| +-- Tech Lead
| |
| +-- Software Engineer
| +-- Systems Engineer
|
+-- VP of Marketing
|
+-- Marketing Manager
|
+-- Product Specialist
+-- Market Analyst

Tree Matching Process

1. Match Root Nodes:

○ Company X: CEO
○ Company Y: CEO
○ Match: Both trees have the same root node "CEO,"
indicating a similar top-level structure.
2. Match VP Level:
○ Company X: VP of Engineering, VP of Sales
○ Company Y: VP of Technology, VP of Marketing
○ Match:
■ VP of Engineering (Company X) ≈ VP of Technology
(Company Y) — Both oversee technical functions.
■ VP of Sales (Company X) ≈ VP of Marketing (Company
Y) — Both oversee customer-facing functions, though
Sales and Marketing are different aspects of business.
 3. Match Manager Level:
○ Company X: Engineering Manager, Sales Manager
○ Company Y: Tech Lead, Marketing Manager
○ Match:
■ Engineering Manager (Company X) ≈ Tech Lead
(Company Y) — Both manage technical teams, though
titles differ.
■ Sales Manager (Company X) ≈ Marketing Manager
(Company Y) — Both manage teams within their
respective functional areas.
4. Match Specialist/Employee Level:
○ Company X: Software Developer, Hardware Engineer,
Account Executive, Sales Analyst
○ Company Y: Software Engineer, Systems Engineer, Product
Specialist, Market Analyst
○ Match:
■ Software Developer (Company X) ≈ Software Engineer
(Company Y) — Equivalent technical roles.
■ Hardware Engineer (Company X) ≈ Systems Engineer
(Company Y) — Both focus on different aspects of
technology.
■ Account Executive (Company X) ≈ Product Specialist
(Company Y) — Both roles deal with specific client or
product-focused tasks.
■ Sales Analyst (Company X) ≈ Market Analyst
(Company Y) — Both roles involve analysis but within
different functional areas.

Analysis of Tree Matching

● Common Structures: Both companies have a hierarchical

structure with a CEO at the top, followed by VPs for different
functional areas, and then managers and specialist roles. This
indicates a similar organizational framework.
● Differences:
○ Functional Focus: Company X has a clearer separation
 between engineering and sales functions, while Company Y
combines technology and marketing under its VPs.
○ Role Titles: The titles and specific roles differ (e.g.,
Engineering Manager vs. Tech Lead), but the functional
responsibilities are similar.