An Efficient Branch-and-Bound Solver for Hitting Set
Data Structures and Algorithms
2023-09-28 v2
Abstract
The hitting set problem asks for a collection of sets over a universe to find a minimum subset of that intersects each of the given sets. It is NP-hard and equivalent to the problem set cover. We give a branch-and-bound algorithm to solve hitting set. Though it requires exponential time in the worst case, it can solve many practical instances from different domains in reasonable time. Our algorithm outperforms a modern ILP solver, the state-of-the-art for hitting set, by at least an order of magnitude on most instances.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2110.11697,
title = {An Efficient Branch-and-Bound Solver for Hitting Set},
author = {Thomas Bläsius and Tobias Friedrich and David Stangl and Christopher Weyand},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.11697},
year = {2023}
}