An Efficient Branch-and-Bound Solver for Hitting Set
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The hitting set problem asks for a collection of sets over a universe U to find a minimum subset of U 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.
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