⏱ 1 minute read
Data Structures & Algorithms¶
Key Topics for ML Engineers¶
| Data Structure | Use Case in ML |
|---|---|
| Arrays / Matrices | Everything (data storage, weights, embeddings) |
| Hash Tables | Vocabulary lookup, tokenization |
| Trees | Decision trees, KD-trees for nearest neighbor |
| Heaps | Priority queues in Dijkstra/A*, beam search |
| Graphs | Neural network topology, computational graphs |
Algorithm Complexity¶
| Operation | Time Complexity | Where It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Matrix multiply \(n \times n\) | \(O(n^3)\) naive, \(O(n^{2.37})\) optimal | Training large models |
| Sorting | \(O(n \log n)\) | Data preprocessing |
| Hash lookup | \(O(1)\) avg | Tokenization, vocab |
| Graph traversal | \(O(V+E)\) | Backpropagation on computation graph |