Two New Perspectives on Multi-Stage Group Testing

Abstract

The group testing problem asks to find d≪n defective elements out of n elements, by testing subsets (pools) for the presence of defectives. In the strict model of group testing, the goal is to identify all defectives if at most d defectives exist, and otherwise to report that more than d defectives are present. If tests are time-consuming, they should be performed in a small constant number s of stages of parallel tests. It is known that a test number O(dlogn), which is optimal up to a constant factor, can be achieved already in s=2 stages. Here we study two aspects of group testing that have not found major attention before. (1) Asymptotic bounds on the test number do not yet lead to optimal strategies for specific n,d,s. Especially for small n we show that randomized strategies significantly save tests on average, compared to worst-case deterministic results. Moreover, the only type of randomness needed is a random permutation of the elements. We solve the problem of constructing optimal randomized strategies for strict group testing completely for the case when d=1 and s≤2. A byproduct of our analysis is that optimal deterministic strategies for strict group testing for d=1 need at most 2 stages. (2) Usually, an element may participate in several pools within a stage. However, when the elements are indivisible objects, every element can belong to at most one pool at the same time. For group testing with disjoint simultaneous pools we show that Θ(sd(n/d)1/s) tests are sufficient and necessary. While the strategy is simple, the challenge is to derive tight lower bounds for different s and different ranges of d versus n.