An Evaluation of the Critical Factors Affecting the Efficiency of Some Sorting Techniques

Sorting allows information or data to be put into a meaningful order. As efficiency is a major concern of computing, data are sorted in order to gain the efficiency in retrieving or searching tasks. The factors affecting the efficiency of shell, Heap, Bubble, Quick and Merge sorting techniques in terms of running time, memory usage and the number of exchanges were investigated. Experiment was conducted for the decision variables generated from algorithms implemented in Java programming and factor analysis by principal components of the obtained experimental data was carried out in order to estimate the contribution of each factor to the success of the sorting algorithms. Further statistical analysis was carried out to generate eigenvalue of the extracted factor and hence, a system of linear equations which was used to estimate the assessment of each factor of the sorting techniques was proposed. The study revealed that the main factor affecting these sorting techniques was time taken to sort. It contributed 97.842%, 97.693%, 89.351%, 98.336% and 90.480% for Bubble sort, Heap sort, Merge sort, Quick sort and Shell sort respectively. The number of swap came second contributing 1.587% for Bubble sort, 2.305% for Heap sort, 10.63% for Merge sort, 1.643% for Quick sort and 9.514% for Shell sort. The memory used was the least of the factors contributing negligible percentage for the five sorting techniques. It contributed 0.571% for Bubble sort, 0.002% for Heap sort, 0.011% for Merge sort, 0.021% for Quick sort and 0.006% for Shell sort.