Optimizations for the Boolean Approach to Computing Minimal Hitting Sets

The Boolean approach to computing minimal hitting sets proposed by Lin and Jiang is known to offer very attractive general performance, but also has its issues, specifically with a cardinality-restricted search. In this paper we propose optimizations regarding the refinement rules, also offering a revised decision strategy as well as optimized termination criteria that exploit cardinality bounds. Our experiments including artificial and real-world samples for the bounded and unbounded case show the potential of our work, where we could achieve speed-ups of up to two orders of magnitude.