A Recovery Algorithm and Pooling Designs for One-Stage Noisy Group Testing under the Probabilistic Framework

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Abstract

Group testing saves time and resources by testing each pre-assigned group instead of each individual, and one-stage group testing emerged as essential for cost-effectively controlling the current COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, the practical challenge of adjusting pooling designs based on infection rate has not been systematically addressed. In particular, there are both theoretical interests and practical motivation to analyze one-stage group testing at finite, practical problem sizes, rather than asymptotic ones, under noisy, rather than perfect tests, and when the number of positives is randomly distributed, rather than fixed.

Here, we study noisy group testing under the probabilistic framework by modeling the infection vector as a random vector with Bernoulli entries. Our main contributions include a practical one-stage group testing protocol guided by maximizing pool entropy and a maximum-likelihood recovery algorithm under the probabilistic framework. Our findings high-light the implications of introducing randomness to the infection vectors – we find that the combinatorial structure of the pooling designs plays a less important role than the parameters such as pool size and redundancy.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.09.21253193: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.


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    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
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    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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