HyperBench: A Benchmark and Tool for Hypergraphs and Empirical Findings

TL;DR

HyperBench provides a comprehensive benchmark, software tools, and a web interface for analyzing hypergraphs, aiding in solving complex queries and constraint satisfaction problems more effectively.

Contribution

It introduces new practical algorithms for hypergraph decompositions, a large hypergraph benchmark, and a web platform for analysis and retrieval.

Findings

Implemented new hypergraph decomposition algorithms.

Created a large, diverse hypergraph benchmark.

Conducted empirical experiments demonstrating tool effectiveness.

Abstract

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.