HyperBench: A Benchmark and Tool for Hypergraphs and Empirical Findings
This addresses a practical need for researchers and practitioners in database and constraint satisfaction fields, though it is incremental as it builds on existing decomposition methods.
The authors tackled the lack of accessible tools and benchmarks for hypergraph decompositions in Conjunctive Queries and Constraint Satisfaction Problems by providing HyperBench, a web-interface with implementations, a comprehensive benchmark, and experimental analyses.
To cope with the intractability of answering Conjunctive Queries (CQs) and solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs), several notions of hypergraph decompositions have been proposed -- giving rise to different notions of width, noticeably, plain, generalized, and fractional hypertree width (hw, ghw, and fhw). Given the increasing interest in using such decomposition methods in practice, a publicly accessible repository of decomposition software, as well as a large set of benchmarks, and a web-accessible workbench for inserting, analyzing, and retrieving hypergraphs are called for. We address this need by providing (i) concrete implementations of hypergraph decompositions (including new practical algorithms), (ii) a new, comprehensive benchmark of hypergraphs stemming from disparate CQ and CSP collections, and (iii) HyperBench, our new web-inter\-face for accessing the benchmark and the results of our analyses. In addition, we describe a number of actual experiments we carried out with this new infrastructure.