Group Testing Procedures for Screening: Probabilistic Model

Abstract

The use of group testing for disease screening has been reinvigorated in the past few years due to COVID-19. To save resources and time, many countries have used group testing strategies as the basis of their COVID-19 national screening programs. Discussions focused on the applications of these testing strategies have appeared both in leading scientific journals (e.g., Shental et al. 2020; Mercer and Salit 2021; Yelin et al. 2020) and in the popular press (as in the Washington Post, NY Times, Scientific American).

This article reviews a class of adaptive group testing procedures that operate under a probabilistic model and the error-free testing assumption described below. In nonadaptive group testing, all tests are fixed in advance before the testing. In adaptive group testing, the information from previous tests can be used.