First of all, your chosen data structure looks fine to me. You did not mention it explicitly, but I assume that the "key" you use in the AVL tree is the day number, i.e. an in-order traversal of the tree would list the nodes in their chronological order.
I would just suggest a cosmetic change: store the maximum value of sick in the node itself, so that you don't have two similar informations (maxLeftSick and maxRightSick) stored in one node instance, but move those two informations to the child nodes, so that your node.maxLeftSick is actually stored in node.left.maxSick, and similarly node.maxRightSick is stored in node.right.maxSick. This is of course not done when that child does not exist, but then we don't need that information either. In your structure maxLeftSick would be 0 when left is not defined. In my proposed structure, you would not have that value -- the 0 would follow naturally from the fact that there is no left child. In my proposal, the root node would have an information in maxSick which is not present in yours, and which would be the sum of your root.maxLeftSick and root.maxRightSick. This information would not really be used, but it is just there to make the structure consistent throughout the tree.
So you would just store one maxSick, which considers the current node's sick value also in that maximum. The processing you do during rotations will need to change accordingly, but will not become more complex.
I will assume that your AVL tree is single-threaded, i.e. you don't keep track of parent-pointers. So create a find method which will return the path to the node to be found. For instance, in Python syntax, it could look like this:
def find(self, day):
node = self.root
path = [] # an array of nodes
while node:
path.append(node)
if node.day == day: # bingo
return path
if day < node.day:
node = node.left
else:
node = node.right
Then the worstBefore method could look like this:
def worstBefore(self, day):
path = self.find(day)
if not path:
return # day not found
# get number of sick people on that day:
sick = path[-1].sick
# look for recent day with greater number of sick
while path:
node = path.pop() # walk upward, starting with found node
if node.day < day and node.sick > sick:
return node.day
if node.left and node.left.maxSick > sick:
# we will find the result in this subtree
node = node.left
while True:
if node.right and node.right.maxSick > sick:
node = node.right
elif node.sick > sick: # bingo
return node.day
else:
node = node.left
So the path returned by the find method will be used to get the parents of a node when you need to backtrack upwards in the tree along that path.
If along that path you find a left child whose maxSick is greater, then you know that the targeted node must be in that subtree. It is then a matter to walk down that subtree in a controlled way, choosing the right child when it still has maxSick greater. Otherwise check the current node's sick value and return that one if that value is greater. Otherwise go left, and repeat.
While there is no such left sub tree, go up along the path. If that parent would be a match, then return it (make sure to verify the day number). Keep checking for left sub trees that have a larger maxSick.
This runs in O(logn) because you first will walk zero or more steps upward and then zero or more steps downward (in a left subtree).
You can see your example scenario run on repl.it. There I focussed on this question, and didn't implement the rotations.
