For other uses of the term Amortization, see the Amortization disambiguation page.

In computer science, an algorithm can be analyzed by its amortized running time or by an amortized consideration of how many actions it performs, on average. In particular, intentional randomness is sometimes introduced into searching and sorting algorithms, which can have the affect of making some algorithmic steps faster, and perhaps make some other steps slower, but which ultimately produce a better overall amortized performance.