In this paper we study the parameterized complexity of the Unique Coverage problem, a variant of the classic Set Cover problem. This problem admits several parameterizations and we show that all, except the standard parameterization and a generalization of it, are unlikely to be fixed‐parameter tractable. We use results from extremal combinatorics to obtain the best‐known kernel for Unique Coverage and the well‐known color‐coding technique of Alon et al. (J. ACM 42(4), 844–856, 1995) to show that a weighted version of this problem is fixed‐parameter tractable. Our application of color‐coding uses an interesting variation of s‐perfect hash families called (k,s)‐hash families which were studied by Alon et al. (J. Comb. Theory Ser. A 104(1), 207–215, 2003) in the context of a class of codes called parent identifying codes (Barg et al. in SIAM J. Discrete Math. 14(3), 423–431, 2001). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of (k,s)‐hash families outside the domain of coding theory. We prove the existence of such families of size smaller than the best‐known s‐perfect hash families using the probabilistic method (Alon and Spencer in The Probabilistic Method, Wiley, New York, 2000). Explicit constructions of such families of size promised by the probabilistic method is open.
