itemsmin

itemsmin is a software library and algorithmic framework designed to minimize a set of items under user-specified constraints while preserving requested properties. It is used to produce compact representations of larger collections, with common goals including preserving coverage, maintaining decision outcomes, or adhering to resource limits. The term itemsmin is often used in discussions of data reduction, feature selection, and inventory optimization.

The project emphasizes modularity and extensibility. It provides a core minimization engine that can be extended with different objective functions, constraint evaluators, and backends. Implementations commonly include exact methods suitable for small problem instances as well as scalable heuristics such as greedy selection, branch-and-bound, and evolutionary algorithms for larger datasets. The library supports evaluation of candidate subsets against user-defined predicates and can incorporate item attributes such as weight, cost, or importance.

Usage typically involves installing the library from package repositories, then importing and calling the minimization routine with a list of items and constraint criteria. For example, given a collection of items with associated weights and values, itemsmin can return a subset that satisfies a total weight limit while maximizing aggregate value. The API is designed to be language-agnostic, with bindings in several common programming languages.

Development and distribution: itemsmin is maintained by an open-source community and released under a permissive license. It ships with documentation, example datasets, and unit tests, and is designed to interoperate with existing data processing pipelines.

See also: optimization, subset selection, set covering, and data reduction.