Fulkerson et al. have given two examples of set covering problems that are empirically difficult to solve. They arise from Steiner triple systems and the larger problem, which has a constraint matrix of size 330 × 45 has only recently been solved. In this note, we show that the Steiner triple systems do indeed give rise to a series of problems that are probably hard to solve by implicit enumera...

In the previous lecture, we covered a series of online/offline edge-weighted Steiner tree/forest problems. This lecture extends the discussion to the node-weighted scope. In particular, we will study the nodeweighted Steiner tree/forest problem and introduce an offline O(logn)−approximation polynomial-time algorithm[KR95]. It is well known there is no polynormial-time algorithm that achieves o(...

We extend the classical algorithms of Valiant and Haussler for learning compact conjunctions and disjunctions of Boolean attributes to allow features that are constructed from the data and to allow a trade-off between accuracy and complexity. The result is a generalpurpose learning machine, suitable for practical learning tasks, that we call the set covering machine. We present a version of the...

In this article, we consider the set covering problem with conflict constraints, i.e., from each conflicting pair of columns at most one column can appear in feasible solution. For problem, propose appropriate pre-processing techniques and several families Valid Inequalities (VIs) for corresponding integer programming model that result simultaneous presence constraints stable (conflict) constra...