What are competitive programming problems that require a tree data structure to solve them?

Question

I want to practice my problem-solving skills that involve the usage of a tree data structure (e.g. Binary Search Tree, Heap, Fenwick Tree, etc.)

The problem should make me search for the right tree data structure and apply it in solving the problem, but not manipulate the tree itself. Hence, problems like the lowest common ancestor, inorder traversal, etc. do not count.

One nice problem that I know is as follows:

N pixels in a row are originally coloured as white:
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWW // N=15 in this case

We now keep recolouring all pixels between position i and position j 
with a different colour c for T times:

T = 1: WWWBBBBBWWWWWWW // i = 4, j = 8, c = B
T = 2: WWWBBGGGGWWWWWW // i = 6, j = 9, c = G
T = 3: YYYBBGGGGWWWWWW // i = 1, j = 3, c = Y
T = 4: YBBBBBGGGWWWWWW // i = 2, j = 5, c = B
...

At the end, you are asked to print the colour of each pixel.

Since N and T can be large, one requires a tree data structure to efficiently update the colour pattern of the pixels.

Can anyone suggest good programming problems of this nature?

mercury0114 · Accepted Answer

One nice problem that I found is:

Given n segments in 2D Euclidean space, find two segments that intersect.

Seek for $O(n cdot log(n))$ solution.

https://cp-algorithms.com/geometry/intersecting_segments.html

mercury0114 · Answer

You have a list $[l_1, l_2, ..., l_N]$ of $N$ distinct integers.
Then you receive $K$ queries where the query $q_i = (a_i, b_i)$ asks you to find
the minimal element in the sublist $[l_{a_i}, l_{a_i+1}, ..., l_{b_i}]$
Preprocess the list to serve $K$ queries in less than $O(K cdot N)$ time.

mercury0114 · Answer

Another one is the following job scheduling problem:

N jobs are arriving with priorities:

priority_1  arrival_time_1  execution_time_1
priority_2  arrival_time_2  execution_time_2
...
priority_N  arrival_time_N  execution_time_N

The arriving jobs are queued. When the CPU can process the next job, he will pick
the one that has already arrived and has the highest priority in the queue. The
job will then be processed for a time equal to its execution time.

Determine the maximum time some job will have to wait in the queue until being
processed.

An efficient implementation of the queue will give $O(N cdot log(N))$ solution.

MrHug · Answer

How about Huffman encodings?

Given a text that uses an alphabet of $n$ unique characters, how can we uniquely encode the alphabet so that the text uses the smallest amount of bits?

More formally for Huffman encodings (as formulated by Tardos & Kleinberg in their book Algorithm Design):

Given an alphabet and a set of frequencies for letters, we would like to produce a prefix code that is as efficient as possible - namely, a prefix code that minimises the average number of bits per letters $ABL(gamma) = sumlimits_{xin S} f_x|gamma(x)|$. We will call such a prefix code optimal.

This has an $O(n log n)$ solution.

What are competitive programming problems that require a tree data structure to solve them?

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