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Enumeration of Minimal Hitting Sets Parameterized by Treewidth

Authors Batya Kenig , Dan Shlomo Mizrahi

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  • Mathematics of computing → Enumeration
Keywords
  • Enumeration
  • Hitting sets

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Abstract

Enumerating the minimal hitting sets of a hypergraph is a problem which arises in many data management applications that include constraint mining, discovering unique column combinations, and enumerating database repairs. Previously, Eiter et al. [Thomas Eiter et al., 2003] showed that the minimal hitting sets of an n-vertex hypergraph, with treewidth w, can be enumerated with delay O^*(n^w) (ignoring polynomial factors), with space requirements that scale with the output size. We improve this to fixed-parameter-linear delay, following an FPT preprocessing phase. The memory consumption of our algorithm is exponential with respect to the treewidth of the hypergraph.

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Batya Kenig and Dan Shlomo Mizrahi. Enumeration of Minimal Hitting Sets Parameterized by Treewidth. In 28th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 328, pp. 8:1-8:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICDT.2025.8

Author Details

Batya Kenig
  • Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel
Dan Shlomo Mizrahi
  • Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Funding

This work was supported by the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (NSF-BSF) Grant No. 2020751.

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