Optimal Retesting Configurations for Hierarchical Group Testing

• Activity Number: 63
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 4, 2013 : 4:00 PM to 5:50 PM
• Sponsor: Biometrics Section
• Author(s): Michael Black*+ and Christopher R. Bilder and Joshua Tebbs
• Companies: University of Nebraska Lincoln and University of Nebraska-Lincoln and University of South Carolina
• Keywords: Group Testing ; Pooled Testing ; informative retesting

Abstract

Hierarchical group testing is a widely implemented procedure used to efficiently screen individuals for infectious diseases and other binary characteristics. This screening protocol works by amalgamating individual specimens into groups for testing. Groups testing positive are successively divided into smaller subgroups and retested to decode positive individuals from negative individuals. In our paper, we propose a general procedure to incorporate risk factor information into the testing process by optimally selecting these subgroup configurations for the individuals. We derive the expected number of tests and classification accuracy measures for our proposals, and we show that our proposals can significantly reduce the number of tests needed and still maintain high classification accuracy. An added benefit is that our proposals can be much more easily applied than most other group testing procedures that take into account risk factor information. We apply our proposals to infectious disease screening performed as part of the Infertility Prevention Project in the United States.