Is Minimum Absolute Difference in BST easy or hard?

Minimum Absolute Difference in BST is classified as an Easy problem on LeetCode. The main concept is recognizing that in-order traversal of a BST produces sorted values, which reduces the problem to comparing adjacent elements.

How to solve Minimum Absolute Difference in BST in O(n)?

Perform an in-order traversal so the BST values are processed in sorted order. Maintain a variable storing the previous node's value and compute the difference with the current node. Update the minimum difference at each step. Since every node is visited once, the algorithm runs in O(n) time.

What is the best approach for Minimum Absolute Difference in BST?

The best approach uses in-order traversal of the Binary Search Tree. In-order traversal outputs node values in sorted order, so the minimum absolute difference must occur between two consecutive values. By tracking the previous node value during traversal, you can compute the difference in O(n) time and O(h) space.

What data structure is used in Minimum Absolute Difference in BST?

The problem uses a Binary Search Tree as the core data structure. The solution typically applies depth-first search with in-order traversal, using either recursion or a stack to process nodes while maintaining the previous value and the current minimum difference.

What is the time complexity of Minimum Absolute Difference in BST?

The optimal solution runs in O(n) time because each node in the tree is visited exactly once during in-order traversal. The space complexity is O(h), where h is the height of the tree, due to the recursion stack or the explicit stack used for traversal.

Minimum Absolute Difference in BST Python or Java solution approach?

Python and Java implementations both follow the same idea: perform an in-order traversal and compare each node's value with the previously visited value. Maintain a global or external variable for the minimum difference. This results in O(n) time and O(h) space for both languages.

Is Minimum Absolute Difference in BST asked at Google, Amazon, or Meta?

Binary Search Tree traversal problems like this frequently appear in interviews at companies such as Amazon, Google, and Meta. They test understanding of BST properties, depth-first traversal, and recognizing when sorted order eliminates unnecessary comparisons.

Description Solution Video 6:31

530. Minimum Absolute Difference in BST

Easy59.3% acceptance3 companies

Given the root of a Binary Search Tree (BST), return the minimum absolute difference between the values of any two different nodes in the tree.

Example 1:

Input: root = [4,2,6,1,3]
Output: 1

Example 2:

Input: root = [1,0,48,null,null,12,49]
Output: 1

Constraints:

The number of nodes in the tree is in the range [2, 10⁴].
0 <= Node.val <= 10⁵

Note: This question is the same as 783: https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-distance-between-bst-nodes/

Asked at 3 companies

Google Meta Amazon

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6:31

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530. Minimum Absolute Difference in BST

Asked at 3 companies

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