Paul Pritchard

Abstract

A given collection of sets has a natural partial order induced by the subset relation. Let the size N of the collection be defined as the sum of the cardinalities of the sets that comprise it. Algorithms have recently been presented that compute the partial order (and thereby the minimal and maximal sets, i.e., extremal sets) in worst-case time O(N 2 = log N ). This paper develops a simple algorithm that uses only simple data structures, and gives a simple analysis that establishes the above worst-case bound on its running time. The algorithm exploits a variation on lexicographic order that may be of independent interest. 1 Introduction Given is a collection F = fS 1 ; : : : ; S k g, where each S i is a set over the same domain D. Define the size of the collection to be N = P i jS i j. Pritchard [4] presented algorithms for finding those sets in F that have no subset in F . Starting from a naive O(N 2 ) algorithm 1 , an algorithm was obtained that had worst-case complexity O...