학술논문

Improving Group Testing via Gradient Descent
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory IEEE J. Sel. Areas Inf. Theory Selected Areas in Information Theory, IEEE Journal on. 5:236-245 2024
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Decoding
Testing
Optimization
Hypercubes
Statistics
Sociology
Vectors
Epidemiology
infectious diseases
group testing
non-adaptive group testing algorithms
encoding
Language
ISSN
2641-8770
Abstract
We study the problem of group testing with non-identical, independent priors. So far, the pooling strategies that have been proposed in the literature take the following approach: a hand-crafted test design along with a decoding strategy is proposed, and guarantees are provided on how many tests are sufficient in order to identify all infections in a population. In this paper, we take a different, yet perhaps more practical, approach: we fix the decoder and the number of tests, and we ask, given these, what is the best test design one could use? We explore this question for the Definite Non-Defectives (DND) decoder. We formulate a (non-convex) optimization problem, where the objective function is the expected number of errors for a particular design. We find approximate solutions via gradient descent, which we further optimize with informed initialization. We illustrate through simulations that our method can achieve significant performance improvement over traditional approaches.