FPT Algorithms for Diverse Collections of Hitting Sets

Abstract: In this work, we study the $d$-Hitting Set and Feedback Vertex Set problems through the paradigm of finding diverse collections of $r$ solutions of size at most $k$ each, which has recently been introduced to the field of parameterized complexity [Baste et al., 2019]. This paradigm is aimed at addressing the loss of important side information which typically occurs during the abstraction process which models real-world problems as computational problems. We use two measures for the diversity of such a collection: the sum of all pairwise Hamming distances, and the minimum pairwise Hamming distance. We show that both problems are FPT in $k + r$ for both diversity measures. A key ingredient in our algorithms is a (problem independent) network flow formulation that, given a set of `base' solutions, computes a maximally diverse collection of solutions. We believe that this could be of independent interest.