Nested Group Testing Procedures for Screening

Abstract

This article reviews a class of adaptive group testing procedures that operate under a probabilistic model assumption as follows. Consider a set of N items, where item i has the probability p (pi in the generalized group testing) to be defective, and the probability 1−p to be non-defective independent from the other items. A group test applied to any subset of size n is a binary test with two possible outcomes, positive or negative. The outcome is negative if all n items are non-defective, whereas the outcome is positive if at least one item among the n items is defective. The goal is complete identification of all N items with the minimum expected number of tests.