A binary search scheme for determining all contaminated specimens

DOI10.1007/S00285-021-01663-6MaRDI QIDQ2232167zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Vassilis G. Papanicolaou

Publication date 4 October 2021

Published in Journal of Mathematical Biology (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.11910

zbMATH Keywords

momentscharacteristic functionnormal distributionlinear regimelimiting distributionprobabilistic testingadaptive group testingaverage-case aspect ratiobinary search schemeprevalence (rate)

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis (62P10) Physiological, cellular and medical topics (92C99) Combinatorial probability (60C99)

Abstract: Specimens are collected from $N$ different sources. Each specimen has probability $p$ of being contaminated, independently of the other specimens. Suppose we can repeatedly take small portions from several specimens, mix them together, and test the mixture for contamination, so that if the test turns positive, then at least one of the samples in the mixture is contaminated. In this paper we consider a binary search scheme for determining all contaminated specimens. More precisely, we study the number $T(N)$ of tests required in order to find all the contaminated specimens, if this search scheme is applied. We derive recursive and, in some cases, explicit formulas for the expectation, the variance, and the characteristic function of $T(N)$. Also, we determine the asymptotic behavior of the moments of $T(N)$ as $Noinfty$ and from that we obtain the limiting distribution of $T(N)$ (appropriately normalized), which turns out to be normal.

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Cites work

• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 5819433 (Why is no real title available?)
• A Method for Detecting All Defective Members in a Population by Group Testing
• Sterrett procedure for the generalized group testing problem
• The cutoff point for group testing

Cited in

(1)

• Searching for contaminants

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