Abstract:
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Infectious disease testing frequently takes advantage of two tools-group testing and multiplex assays-to help make testing timely and cost effective. Until the work of Tebbs et al. (2013) and Hou et al. (2017), there was no research available to understand how best to apply these tools simultaneously. This recent work focused on applications where each individual is considered to be identical in terms of the probability of infection. However, information, such as past behavior and presence of symptoms, is often available on each individual to allow one to estimate individual-specific probabilities. Therefore, we propose the first informative group testing methods for multiplex assays that take into account these individual-specific probabilities. We show that our methods lead to a reduction in the expected number of tests while maintaining similar accuracy as previously proposed methods.
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