Group testing with nested pools

ARMENDÁRIZ, INÉS; FERRARI, PABLO A.; FRAIMAN, DANIEL; MARTINEZ, MARIO; PONCE DAWSON, SILVINA

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC

Lugar: New York; Año: 2022

0018-9448

In order to identify the infected individuals of a population, their samples are divided in equally sized groups called pools and a single laboratory test is applied to each pool. Individuals whose samples belong to pools that test negative are declared healthy, while each pool that tests positive is divided into smaller, equally sized pools which are tested in the next stage. In the $(k+1)$-th stage all remaining samples are tested. If $p2^{-51}$. We also show that the cost of the best among the schemes $(3^k,dots,3)$ is of order $Oig(plog(1/p)ig)$, comparable to the information theoretical lower bound $plog_2(1/p)+(1-p)log_2(1/(1-p))$, the entropy of a Bernoulli$(p)$ random variable.