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 items, where item has the probability ( in the generalized group testing) to be defective, and the probability to be nondefective independent of the other items. A group test applied to any subset of size is a binary test with two possible outcomes, positive or negative. The outcome is negative if all items are nondefective, whereas the outcome is positive if at least one item among the items is defective. The goal is complete identification of all items with the minimum expected number of tests.