Abstract
Constraint Programming is a powerful paradigm to model and solve combinatorial problems. While there are many kinds of constraints, the table constraint is perhaps the most significant—being the most well-studied and has the ability to encode any other constraints defined on finite variables. However, constraints can be very voluminous and their size can grow exponentially with their arity. To reduce space and the time complexity, researchers have focused on various forms of compression. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on maximal frequent itemsets technique and area measure for enumerating the maximal frequent itemsets relevant for compressing table constraints. Our experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of this approach on compression and on solving compressed constraint satisfaction problem.
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Data availability
The Oscar solver is available at https://bitbucket.org/oscarlib/oscar/src/dev/. The Instances used in our experiments to validate the approach can be found at: https://bitbucket.org/pschaus/xp-table/src/master/instances/. The source code of our implementation is available at https://bitbucket.org/pschaus/xp-table/src/master/instances/.
Notes
The area of an itemset is the product of its length and its frequency value.
benchmarks downloaded from https://bitbucket.org/pschaus/xp-table/src/master/instances/.
For an itemset u \(\in\) \({{{\mathcal {L}}}}_{{\mathcal {I}}}\) and a transaction t, \(match(p,t) = true iff p\) covers the transaction t.
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This work has been sponsored by the General Directorate for Scientific Research and Technological Development, Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research DGRSDT, Algeria.
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Bennai, S., Amroun, K., Loudni, S. et al. An efficient heuristic approach combining maximal itemsets and area measure for compressing voluminous table constraints. J Supercomput 79, 650–676 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-022-04667-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-022-04667-1