Codes from incidence matrices of hypergraphs

Abstract: Binary codes are constructed from incidence matrices of hypergraphs. A combinatroial description is given for the minimum distances of such codes via a combinatorial tool called ``eonv". This combinatorial approach provides a faster alternative method of finding the minimum distance, which is known to be a hard problem. This is demonstrated on several classes of codes from hypergraphs. Moreover, self-duality and self-orthogonality conditions are also studied through hypergraphs.